“Stars and shadows,” he breathed.
I stood there, my legs threatening to fold, my hands turned out toward what had been the infirmary. The world swayed. “She’s… Isa… we need to help her.”
“No.” His hand landed on my shoulder. “We need to run.”
I staredat the guard while the world screamed and boomed around us. The night hardly felt real. “Run? Run where?”
“The inner wall.” In the torchlight, his face flickered with shadows of panic and under-eye hollows that made him look almost ghoulish. Terror bled into his voice. “It’s a fucking disaster. The whole southern district is breached.”
Breached?
That meant…
No. I’d been told the creatures weren’t real. They were fairy tales. My mind clung to this notion as I turned toward him. He’d already started jogging toward the barracks’ gate, and I started after him. “What about the other guard? The night guard on the wa?—”
“Dead.” He didn’t slow. “They’re all dead.”
I stopped, struck as if by a blow. My eyes followed his torch’s light as it bobbed ahead, faster, farther. He ran withoutslowing, without stopping to look back. Soon the light disappeared around the corner of the gate. Darkness closed in.
Maybe he’d forgotten about me. Maybe he didn’t care.
Maybe I’d been knocked unconscious when those guard had attacked me and I was having a terrible, concussed nightmare.
Dead. They were all dead. Isa, the regiment commander, the boys who had attacked me. Theo.
Theo was dead. My best friend. I’d just seen him?—
A boom shook the district, and I jerked. My eyes shot up to a sight I had never seen in my life. High above, a glowing green spear pierced the sky. It looked like someone had shot off a firework, but this was far more eerie and beautiful. Spangles of green rained off the spear as it cut through the air a league above me.
My face lifted, eyes following the spear’s path, and I turned as it arced past the barracks and raced toward the inner wall.
What the hell was that thing?
With a hiss and a green flash, the spear exploded. I was thrown from my feet, and I hit the ground flat on my back. All the air was pressed out of my lungs in one go.
Green filled the sky before me, momentarily blinding me as I gasped without drawing air. The green light took on a mushroom’s shape, rising, rising toward the sky. The mushroom cloud splintered at the edges, winking at me with forest-green splendor.
Finally, after a few seconds, my lungs filled. The green faded to seared halos in my vision as I blinked and blinked again. I was in pain all over, disoriented, my heart a bird in my chest.
And for some reason, something the regiment commander had told us on our first day as trainees floated back to mind.
A sword is a sword is a sword.
I’d thought it was cryptic, wet-brain bullshit from a man who didn’t know or couldn’t be bothered with what to say to his thirtieth batch of trainees. But here on the ground, I understood.
A spear is a spear is a spear.
An explosion is an explosion is an explosion.
A thing as obvious as a sword is nothing but a sword. Don’t deny what you can see, hear, and smell.
Of course—I understood now.
We’d been attacked. This was an assault on the outer wall.
I rubbed a hand down my face. We’d covered this in training: my first prerogative as a guard was to protect the citizens as they evacuated. And the only other guard I’d seen had run for the inner wall.
Fuck that. My mother was among the citizens out here. And she lived in the Dip, close to the wall.
