His rounds went wide.
His attention split, half of it on the guards and half of it on the terror coming off Sullha in waves, on the wet warmth and coppery smell next to him that wasn't coming from his body. One of the women had been hit, and he didn't know who or whether she was still alive.
With his attention fractured, he became careless, and rounds that could have been avoided found him because he cared more about the two people he was shielding than about what happened to him.
The collective felt his degradation and compensated, the others shifting their fire to cover the angle Yaaf was failing to hold and absorbing his lapse, but it cost them, and Yaaf could not collect himself enough to do his part. He took another round through the shoulder and bore down harder over Sullha and Tomek and bled into the floor of the truck.
"You're hit," Sullha whimpered beneath him. "You're bleeding!"
"I heal fast," he managed. "Stay down."
"Yaaf—"
"Just stay down."
The bullets were coming from all directions now, and the collective realized that they were outnumbered and they might not make it out of this alive. Worse, the people they cared about were not going to make it.
Then suddenly things changed. More shots sounded, but they weren't hitting the truck.
The Guardians are here, Number Seven projected into the hive mind what he was seeing. When the shooting had started he'd ducked under the truck, and now they could see through his eyes the Guardians and the Kra-ell warriors who were coming from the direction of the mansion in a hard and fast approach, with Anandur at the apex of it. They were shooting at the guards from the flank and the rear with devastating efficiency. The fire that had been pouring into the truck turned to meet the new threat, but not fast enough.
The Kra-ell, who were faster than the Guardians, closed the distance with a speed the Eight had never witnessed, and the real carnage began. The Kra-ell went through the trained Brotherhood immortal soldiers as if they were immobile humans.
The clan's warriors were ruthlessly eliminating the checkpoint guards, of whom there were many more than the Eight had originally estimated.
"Move the truck," Anandur's voice roared over the channel. "We've got it. Get them to the mansion, go, go, go?—"
Number Seven jumped behind the wheel, and the truck lurched forward off the chewed-up ground of the checkpoint, swerving around the wreckage and running over the bodies, and accelerated up the resort approach toward the mansion with the Guardians fighting a rearguard behind it.
Yaaf took stock of the situation.
They were all hit. Every one of the Eight had taken rounds, including Number Seven who had remained upfront and ducked under the truck when the shooting had started.
They were healing, the wounds closing, but the blood was everywhere, slick on the boards and soaking the women's clothes where the men had bled over them. It was not only the enhanced who'd been hit either. Yaaf smelled it clearly now. He turned his head and saw that two of the women and Petrov had been hit. The scientist's face was gray, and Anita was pressing her hand hard over the wound while Dimitri held him upright.
"We have wounded civilians," Yaaf said into the clan's earpiece. "Two women and Doctor Petrov. The women's injuries are superficial. Petrov's looks serious."
"Julian is ready to receive them," Yamanu came back. "We're going straight into the tunnel and collapsing the entrance as soon as everyone is in."
That meant that they had gotten the two last chests out. It also meant that any future attempt to infiltrate the island or to get women out of the enclosure would have to be done some other way.
As soon as the truck stopped in front of the mansion, armed clan warriors ran out to cover them from potential enemy fire. Yaaf lifted himself off Sullha and Tomek, and the loss of the contact was a physical pain, worse than the multiple bullets he had taken, but he did not have time to examine or indulge this now.
He looked down at them, his eyes roving over their bodies to make sure neither had been hit.
Sullha stared up at him.
Her face was white and streaked with tears and blood—his blood. Tomek was clinging to her, trembling and crying.
He sighed with relief. They were both alive and whole, and that was the only thing that mattered.
As he offered his hand to help her rise, she gripped it in both of hers and held on, keeping her gaze firmly on his face. The strength of her grip spoke louder than words ever could.
36
YAMANU
They came down into the basement in a flood, the ten dormant women, two children, and four civilians, herded down the ramp by eight bloodied enhanced soldiers.
