I prayed to the gods sailing the stars to protect my friend, to harbor her from the demise wreaking havoc around us. It felt like death itself had come to collect its debts.
Darting around the corner, I came to a sudden halt just in time to avoid crashing into a petite figure.
“Eislyn,” I screeched at the back of a woman limping away from me.
Her round shoulders twitched. She twisted around, her jaw falling as she spotted me. “Kali.” Leaning against the gray wall of a ten-story-tall dwelling, she panted. “You’re alive.”
“Well, yeah.” Scrutinizing the eerily noiseless road, I marched up to her. “We got rid of the Head of Ilasall.”
“But I saw the Spire explode.” She blew her chocolate bangs upward, exposing the deep laceration running diagonally from her hairline to her eyelid that rattled my bones. “We thought—” She hissed, pressing a hand to her belly, far from swollen at such an early stage of pregnancy.
“What’s wrong?” I leaped to her side, trying to yank her sand-hued sweater up to her chest so I could examine her. “Eislyn, where does it hurt?” Her face contorted from pain, her dimpled chin trembling, and I begged her, “Please, Eislyn, please, tell me.”
If she wouldn’t let me see for myself, all I could do was trust her. She was the second-in-command to the doc, not I. I had to know what her wounds were to help her.
She gave me a weak smile. “It’s my abdomen.”
Without further encouragement, she let me move her arms aside. Alarms blared in my head as I stared at the two bullet holes right above her navel and a gash so deep it gushed blood in pulses.
I covered her wounds to hopefully staunch the bleeding. “What— What do I do?” Heat poured through my fingers as they slipped across her flesh, the sticky substance prohibiting me from exerting pressure. “Eislyn, what?—”
“I need to find Eli.” She gazed at the end of the street, the resignation in her brown eyes causing a flash of cold to blast me.
I shoved it away. Panic had no place in war. Now, logic… It sat in the driver’s seat. And it told me if I pushed Eislyn into the hands of medical staff, she would survive. She would.
Shewould.
“We need to take you to the hospital.” Throwing her left arm over my shoulders, I grunted from the majority of her weight falling on me. “Which way is the closest one?”
Her and her teams’ task was to take over the three major ones, cutting off Ilasall’s arteries of med support and leaving their injured soldiers to fend for themselves. She, and only she, knew which hospital we should head to.
“No,” she objected, so sternly it caused my steps to falter. I hadn’t heard her exert her wishes so firmly before. “It’s too far.”
I dragged her along the sidewalk, around the deceased littering the road like ragged dolls. “But?—”
“I have to find Eli. He—” She cried out as we maneuvered around an overturned silver vehicle. “He left us to join the fight in another neighborhood.” As we trudged over a pile of the dead, all marked with black bands on their wrists, she wheezed. “I couldn’t continue working without him.” Her confession fluttered out in a whisper. “I just…can’t.”
Her murmur beat against my ribs like a mallet.
I understood her. If I was in her place, I’d want the same. I’d spent the hike to the Spire in a daze, chopping the soldiers one by one, and only when I’d spotted Gedeon and Zion had the haze lifted.
“Okay.” I hoisted her higher on my side. “I’ll take you to him.” Wherever he was.
I didn’t dare a glimpse back to see if Zion and Gedeon were following us. The absence of the scuff of their boots and the lone gunshots gave me the answer.
The sole reason they’d leave me be was if they were tackling an obstacle between us.
The war was far from over.
One, two, three, four, five streets faded behind us as we delved deeper into the city, pausing at each corner so Eislyn could take a break.
We ducked behind bullet-warped buses to hide from soldiers, prayed to whoever would listen to us to clear the path for us, and nodded in appreciation to Ilasall’s residents covering our backs instead of ensuring our departure to whichever realm came next.
As we turned another corner, similar to any of the countless we’d already passed, Eislyn perked up. The sudden shift of her weight caused me to stagger, and I teetered, willing my failing legs to hold up.
Because at the far side of the road, a tall, lonely figure was staggering in the middle of the road.
Using his rifle as a cane, Eli surveyed the intersection, the white paint of crosswalks streaked in scarlet.
