I shook my head. “You shouldn’t.”
Her eyes met mine, and in them, I could see she received the message I wasn’t saying. In this case, seeing what lay inside would haunt her for the rest of her life. It was bad enough that she could picture it.
“Okay,” she whispered through more tears. Henry was already beside her. He took her arm and guided her back to where Beacon lay on the grass. No words, no hesitation. He’d done this before—walked into the worst of it so the people he loved wouldn’t have to carry it alone.
When two more of our teammates headed inside, I joined them and reiterated what I’d told my brother about the number of blasts and that there could be more.
Like me, they both knew we had no choice but to go in and save everyone we could, regardless of the risk. It was our duty.
The corridor was worseon the second pass. Cracks had widened in the stone since I’d carried Beacon out, and plaster dust sifted from the ceiling in a fine, constant rain. The air was thicker, hotter, and the structuralgroaning had deepened to a pitch I could feel in my sternum.
Beams of light cut white lines across rubble that had been shapes in the haze twenty minutes ago and were now visible for what they were—broken stone, splintered timber, and the remains of the hand-carved table that had saved my life. Now, it was split in half under a section of vaulted ceiling.
Kingston was marking the positions of the dead for the recovery crews. Amaryllis was on her knees at a body, with two fingers on the neck. She shook her head at me and moved on.
I worked the east side of the hall, closest to the gallery collapse. The footing was bad here. Rubble was stacked three and four feet deep, with treacherous gaps. I climbed over a fallen support beam and found two more bodies in the space it had created when it dropped. A man and a woman who must’ve been seated close together when the ceiling came down. Neither was alive.
I marked their position for the recovery crews and kept working the debris field. Chair legs jutted froma pile of plaster. One shoe. A briefing folder with its pages soaked dark.
A groan, faint, from under the rubble to my right, stopped me. Next, I heard steady, deliberate knocking. Someone was alive under there.
I changed direction and came face-to-face with Dagger, who’d heard it too.
“It’s Givre,” he said, pointing to a forearm extending from under a slab of masonry, its pale skin coated gray with dust, and there was a silver ring on the index finger. Her hands were curled against the rubble, and they twitched as we got close.
Dagger dropped to his knees and started clearing the debris from around her arm. He worked fast but placed each piece of stone where it wouldn’t shift the weight on top of her. I came at it from the opposite side. The concrete had cracked across the middle, and one half rested on split wood, creating maybe eight inches of clearance. The gap she was in was the only reason she was alive.
We couldn’t lift the slab without risking the timber, and if it shifted, the clearance disappeared. I worked the smaller pieces loose from the edges while Daggercleared a path along the length of her body. Each piece we removed changed the load on what remained. Overhead, noises from the structure shifting got louder.
Just as a crack that sounded like a rifle shot rang out, we worked her shoulder and upper body clear. Givre—Maëlle Valais—was prone, conscious, but her breathing was shallow and she couldn’t speak.
Dagger got the last of the debris off her legs, and I eased the broken timber out from under the slab one inch at a time while he cradled the masonry to keep it from dropping. The slab settled onto the rubble, and she was free.
Two medics rushed over with a stretcher and dropped it next to us. Dagger was off his knees and out of their way before they asked. I did the same. They stabilized her neck and got her on in under a minute.
Dagger followed the stretcher. I stayed.
2
BEACON
The grass was cold and damp against my trousers. That was the thing my brain chose to hold on to while the building came apart behind me.
Lyra dropped beside me and pulled me into her arms. I grabbed her back with my one good hand and held on tight to the woman who was more than my boss; she was my family. Her father and my grandmother were siblings, and I’d lived with her and her husband since my parents died when I was a child.
“Katarina.”
“Lyra. Oh God.”
My voice cracked, and I pressed my face into her shoulder. She was shaking. I was too.
A medic had cut my sleeve to splint my left arm and taped gauze over the gash on my head. He braced my knee with what he had and told me to stay off it. Iwanted to tell him to forget about me and go help the people inside the building, but there was no one left to help. Everyone they’d carried out so far was under a sheet.
Magnolia was sitting on the grass twenty yards from me. A medic was pressing gauze to her ear. She’d walked out on her own before Blackjack carried me through.
Stretchers came from the main entrance, or what was left of it. I counted them. The first shape was too broad to be anyone but a man I’d known since I was a girl. The second was someone small. The third came out while the medic was taping my knee, and I made him move so I could see.
Lyra’s tears ran lines down the dust on her face, and she didn’t wipe them. Henry sat silently beside her with as much of his body pressed against hers as he could manage.
