Page 136 of The Ashes of Summer

Then nothing.

My grip tightens around my weapon. Beside me Summer stands perfectly still—not frozen, focused—and I can feel her staring at that building. Waiting. Remembering.

The lock clicks, unnaturally loud in the quiet.

The handle turns.

The guard barely has time to register what he's looking at. One second he's standing there in the gap with his hand still on the door, and the next Black's man fires and the crack of it splits the night open. The round catches him high in the forehead and he goes backward through the doorway like somebody cut his strings.

Constance is already moving—flat against the wall beside the frame, out of the line of it, exactly where Black told her to be.

"Move!"

We surge forward, and the adrenaline hits my bloodstream hard enough to almost drown the pain out.

Almost.

The second I cross the threshold, the smell hits me.

Jesus Christ.

Sweat. Unwashed bodies. Damp concrete. Underneath all of it something sour and animal that I've smelled twice before in my career, both times in rooms I still see when I close my eyes.

Rows of mattresses cover the floor exactly as Summer described. Thin curtains hang from metal poles, sectioning the space into pathetic little compartments. Some stained. Some torn. None of them washed in years.

The women stare at us. Lots of them—sitting on mattresses, curled under blankets, standing frozen behind the hanging curtains. A girl who can't be older than nineteen blinks at me from the corner, a blanket clutched against her chest so tight her knuckles have gone white. The woman beside her doesn't move at all. Her eyes are swollen from crying and there are bruises ringing both wrists.

Neither of them speaks. Neither of them so much as flinches toward us.

Like they can't process what they're looking at. Like rescue stopped being a real thing a long time ago.

Rage floods through me, because Summer was here. And if Moore hadn’t have taken her to try to morph into Annalise, she could have ended up here instead. Sleeping on one of these mattresses. Breathing this air. Lying awake in the dark listening to these women cry themselves to sleep.

The thought hits hard enough that I nearly miss the movement to my left.

Nearly.

A guard comes through one of the hanging curtains with a handgun already up, and training takes over before thought does. I fire. The shot catches him square in the chest and his body slams back through the divider, taking fabric and poles down with him in a tangled heap.

Screaming detonates across the warehouse.

Another guard appears near the loading bay entrance and one of Black's men drops him before I've even got my sights up. No hesitation. No warning. Just efficient violence, the kind men learn from years of fighting monsters in places with worse names than this one.

Then everything comes apart at once. Women scrambling off mattresses. Crying. Screaming. One woman drops to her knees and sobs so hard she can't get air in. Another presses both hands over her mouth and screams the same word over and over.

"No. No. No."

Like she's certain this is another trick. Another game.

Then Summer steps forward.

"It's okay!" Her voice cuts clean through the chaos, and every head in that warehouse turns. "It's okay," she shouts again. "We're getting you out."

The change moves through the room like something physical. One woman starts crying. Another presses her hands to her mouth. A third just stares at Summer like she's looking at something holy. And standing there in the middle of the panic and the gunfire, I finally understand what I'm watching.

They aren't looking at us. They aren't looking at the weapons or the men or the open door behind us.

They're looking at her. Because they recognize her. Not her face.