The rain hadn’t started.
The air was still.
Too still.
Mara saw it in my face. “What is it?”
I reached for my sidearm.
“They found another way.”
Then I was running.
Boots striking stone. Breath steady. Pulse rising.
One word driving everything.
Lina.
Chapter Seventeen
Raid on the Pass
Lina
The first siren didn’t sound like danger.
It was a soft rising tone, the same call they used for drills—three short bursts echoing through the upper tunnels like a bird’s cry.
I was in the storeroom with two children, sorting ration packets into crates. When the tone repeated, sharper this time, the older one—Miko, eight and braver than most adults I knew—looked up at me.
“That’s the warning,” he said. “Mara says we’re supposed to go to the vents.”
I kept my voice steady. “Then that’s where we’re going.”
The younger girl clutched my sleeve. “Is Rygnar coming?”
“Yes,” I said. “He’s ahead of us.”
We ran.
The corridors filled fast—Mesaarkan and humans moving together with the practiced urgency of people who had done this before. Lights dimmed to red. The mountain’s systems woke around us, a low, steady hum building through the stone.
I kept the children close as we joined the flow toward the emergency shafts. The ground trembled beneath our feet—distant impacts, muffled but growing.
They’d found the outer gate.
The crowd surged at a junction ahead—too many bodies, too much noise.
“Miko—stay with me,” I said, tightening my grip on his hand.
Someone stumbled into us. Another body slammed into my shoulder.
For a second—just a second—I lost hold of him.
“Miko!”
Panic spiked. I pushed forward, scanning faces, trying to find him in the crush of bodies.
