This piece was headed for the barracks.
It was headed for us.
“Vaelen’s bleeding sky,” Isa whispered.
Her fingers tightened over mine, and with a suddenness andstrength I couldn’t have predicted, she swung me past her and off the porch of the infirmary. Both her hands went to my shoulders, and she shoved me as hard as she could into the dusty yard.
Her shove propelled me into a stumbling run. The momentum carried me forward until the toe of my boot caught a rock, and I fell forward. I braced myself on my shoulder, rolling over it once and then twice more until I shored hard up against the stone well in the center of the yard. My back came to rest against the curved stones, which gave me a view of the infirmary behind me.
For a second, I saw her. Isa the nurse, bowed legs braced, staring back at me. I couldn’t tell if it was terror or some odd mixture of concern and relief on her face. Then the world rocked, and I was thrown hard against the well once more. Dust flew into my face, forcing my eyes shut and filling my mouth.
Pain lanced up my back and into my legs, twice as potent as when my nose had been broken and repaired. The reverberation was so powerful I thought my eardrums had burst. Through it I heard wood explode, buildings crumble.
But I wasn’t dead.
I dragged in a breath and sucked in air through what felt like a straw. Mostly it was dust and grit, and I wheezed and coughed and coughed.
I couldn’t open my eyes, but who cared about eyes when you couldn’t breathe? Somewhere distantly I sensed dust and detritus raining down around me, pebbling over the ground and my body.
I forced myself onto my hands and knees and scrabbled for the side of the well. My hands found their way up the stones and to the lip and wooden cover, until I finally took hold of the still-intact rope at the center and began pulling at it.
The bucket wasn’t far down; they raised it from the deep river to keep it dry at night. And with any luck, there would be some water left inside…
The bucket sloshed when it hit the rail.Yes,there was water. Ilifted the cover, grabbed for the bucket with one hand, jerked it over to me, and upturned the whole thing over my face and head.
The chill hit like a shock. The water raced down my throat and nearly choked me. I dropped the bucket and coughed again, this time spitting up dust as I did. I swallowed and breathed in hard, and this time my throat let in enough air to regain some sense of the world beyond the well and the bucket.
Around me, more booming sounded. The ground thudded at uneven intervals, sending vibrations up through my boots.
I wiped at my eyes with the back of my hand, only spreading the dust around. I pulled at the collar of my shirt and scrubbed at my face, my eyes.
Finally, I could see.
Around me, dust drifted down like light snow. And before me, in the barracks yard, a behemoth rock loomed. It was unmoving, jagged, some twenty feet tall and at least twice that long.
I stared, uncomprehending. Until my eyes fell on the stones that comprised the rock.
All at once, sense came back to me. My eyes flicked toward the southern wall; all I could see through the dust was the terrifying sight of its absence.
This rock before me was a chunk of it.
Then, the shock: Isa had been there.
“Isa!” I lurched forward. My back and legs objected, but I ignored them, rushing to the fallen stone. Where my fingers touched felt familiar in a way I couldn’t place, but also unfamiliarly hot. The stone was almost scalding.
“Isa,” I called again, my voice small under the cacophony of booms and shouts and calls. Some vague part of my mind wondered why the guards’ horn hadn’t sounded, before or even now. But that was only a thread beneath the terror.
Isa had been standing here.
I skirted the wall-fragment, toward the infirmary. Maybe she was still inside. Maybe she was trapped inthere?—
When I came around the side, I stopped hard. My breath sawed in and out, lancing me every time. And I let out a wail I didn’t know I had in me.
The infirmary was gone. It was just… gone.
All that remained were shards of wood, scattered in a blast radius around the edge of the barracks.
Footsteps sounded behind me. A torch flared at my side, lighting the face of an older day guard, and he stared over the wreckage with me.
