My body was beginning to protest staying awake.
Ignoring the bone-grinding grip the two grunts had on me, I murmured, “I’ll see how you move yourself when I rip your entrails out through your asshole and make you eat them.”
“What nonsense are you spewing, huh?” The same idiot pushed me again, but then stepped aside—the squadron leader had fixed him with a glower.
Yet the knock had been enough for me to lurch sideways. The soldiers caught me, righting me once more, silently urging me to resume walking to their destination.
As we continued our trek, we passed an alleyway, and my insides twisted into a knot. Yesterday’s dinner crawled back to my throat as I spotted heaps of the fallen, all nestled in the narrow passageway. Black wristbands looped around corpses’forearms like chains, trapping the souls instead of setting them free.
Ardaton was as much of a monster-infested city as Ilasall had been.
My stomach curdled, yet we marched on, right into the center of the intersection, just a few blocks away from the Spire. The ruins of the once tallest glass building in Ilasall loomed on the horizon.
“You said you have survived the worst things imaginable.” The commander of our group gestured to his right, to a silver bus tilted on its side. “I don’t think you know what that means.”
A coated-in-scarlet head emerged around the front of the vehicle, and just like that, instantly, the universe around me evaporated. The pangs of pain slithering in my muscles dissolved like a first snow, my focus narrowing in on the man leaping over the bus.
“No,” I breathed as Zion ran right at me?—
The squadron leader gave a sign, and six soldiers abandoned their posts near the closest military trucks, rushing straight at the unhinged man who’d become my home over the last seven months.
As they clashed, so did I. Thrashing in the restraints the brutes holding me had formed out of their limbs, I screamed, the force shredding my vocal cords.
But the cage locking me in place held, not a tremor rocking through it as I failed to free myself.
Zion lashed out with everything he had at the six soldiers, but I didn’t need to ask to know he was running on fumes. Add in his fractured wrist…
The men exchanged punches and blows, but not one of them picked up a firearm or a knife.
Were their orders not to?—
The soldier with a soaked-in-red uniform, the hue matching Ardaton’s emblem, whipped out his handgun. Right as Zion turned, the butt of the weapon connected with his temple.
The world stopped spinning as he struck the ground, unconscious.
I grew motionless. As frozen as Zion. Icicles pierced my joints, preventing me from sprinting to his body, from trying to wake him up, from checking if his pulse was steady.
If not for the two soldiers squishing my upper arms, I would’ve collapsed onto the road. All thoughts had abandoned me besides the turmoil of emotions boiling in the marrow of my bones.
So I opened my mouth and let it all out.
The rage.
The torment.
The powerlessness.
My throat vibrated from the trial I was subjecting it to, but I pushed on, and on, and on, until my scream turned hoarse and I lost my voice.
“You think this was bad?” The commander pressed two of his smeared-in-dirt fingers to my jaw, swiveling my head to the other side of the crossroad. “How about seeing your leader surrender?”
I choked mid-pant. On the sidewalk, behind one of the steel-colored cars assigned to green-banded, Ezra stood beside Gedeon, the former’s arm thrown over the latter’s shoulders.
Gedeon’s attention bounded between me, stuck in the hands of the enemy, and Zion’s immobile form. Possible courses of action, evaluation of outcomes, and available choices, they all flashed in Gedeon’s expression, one after another.
Ezra gave a curt nod to the squadron leader, and before I could decipher their exchange, he gripped my uniform shirt, tearing it down the middle, exposing my bra.
The chill invading the atmosphere launched its assault on me, causing goosebumps to erupt all over my skin. The commander ripped the fabric down my right shoulder, all the way to my elbow, his touch so repulsive I shuddered.
