He walked with her father to the booth, where his parents were speaking with Mrs. Attwood. Attie’s siblings were huddled close together, the sweetness of the lemonade and cake long since forgotten as another bomb dropped, splitting the air like thunder.
Tobias sat on the bench beside Garrett, one of the twins. The boy’s eyes were wide with fear, his shoulders hunched. Another bomb dropped, closer this time. The dishes rattled; the paintings shivered on the walls. In the kitchen, it sounded like a stack of plates had overturned and shattered.
Tobias reached into the small leather pack he had brought with him from home. His mum had thought he was going to take his trophies, his ribbons. All the objects that embodied his success on the racetrack. But he had reached for his old car collection. His wooden toys from childhood.
He set one on the table and nudged it to Henry. Then one to Ainsley. Hilary. Laven. And last, to Garrett at his side.
“I used to race these all the time when I was your age,” he told them.
Another bomb fell. The ground shuddered and Ainsley cried out, but she clutched the wooden car to her chest.
“Which one of you thinks they can beat me?” Tobias asked.
“I can!” Garrett was swift to reply.
“No, me!” Laven insisted.
As the siblings began to talk about who thought they could win, admiring the different details of their assigned cars, Tobias glanced up and met his mother’s gaze. There was a smile on her face, a glimmer of tears in her eyes. He had never seen her wear such an expression, and he had to distract himself before the emotion snared him.
“All right,” he said, setting the last car on the table. “Let’s race.”
* * *
Helena sat at her desk in the Inkridden Tribune, smoking her ninth cigarette of the day. Her feet were propped up beside her typewriter, whiskey sparkled in a glass by her elbow, and she was gazing up at the ceiling tiles when the bombs began to drop.
She was alone in the office, but that was how she wanted it to be.
She drew in air, the scent of the Tribune. She breathed out smoke.
The bombs shook the earth and split the afternoon, one after the next after the next. Cracks crept across the ceiling. Dust rained down in streams. The pipes groaned and the electricity finally flickered off.
Helena let her feet drop to the floor. She drank a sip of whiskey and reached for the paper on her desk, feeding it into the typewriter.
It was so dark she could hardly see, but a stream of sunshine still found its way through the small window in the wall behind her. The light spilled across her desk, cut through the paper like a fiery blade.
She hadn’t written for herself in a very long time.
And as Oath crumbled around her, she did the only thing she could manage.
She lit another cigarette, and she began to type.
* * *
Marisol stood beside Keegan on the hill, gazing at Oath in the distance.
They had marched the army kilometers back to take shelter in a valley, and a breeze was blowing from the west. The sun was at its zenith, and Marisol shielded her eyes, watching the eithrals swoop through clouds and glide between the skyscrapers, their wings iridescent in the light as they dropped the bombs.
Marisol had counted twenty-five eithrals. The most she had ever beheld at one time.
Smoke and dust soon rose, making it hard to see as the southern half of Oath began to collapse.
“Keegan,” Marisol said, a sob breaking her voice. She covered her mouth with her hand, but the name slipped between her fingers again. “Keegan.”
It was the only word she could say. Her wife’s name, for within it was everything Marisol loved and dreamt of. It was strength and comfort, safety and wildness. A past and the present and the future.
Keegan pulled her close. Marisol pressed her face to her chest, where Keegan’s heart pounded. She felt the stars pinned on her uniform bite into her cheek, but Marisol welcomed the pain as she closed her eyes.
Once, months ago, Marisol had dreamt of life returning to normal after the war ended. How life had been before the war. She had thought their days could eventually return to such an era, as if they had never been touched by this storm. But as she felt the ground tremble, Keegan’s arm tightening around her, she knew how na?ve she had been.
Some scars might fade in time, but others never would.
Marisol would never forget that day in the Bluff. How it had changed her. Left a mark on her soul.
And she would never forget the day Oath fell.
* * *
Forest held Sarah’s hand, crouched behind a parked motorcar in the street. He had found her at the Gazette and she had wanted to return home for her father before they met up with the others, as he had predicted.
But Forest hadn’t expected the streets to be overflowing, chaotic. The trams had shut down, and Sarah lived a good distance from Broad Street, toward the southernmost part of the city.
The bombs had started before they could reach her neighborhood.
“We’re almost there,” Sarah whispered, but he could feel her trembling. “Just a few more blocks.”
Forest swallowed. His adrenaline was like fire in his blood, but he could also feel the nausea and fatigue settling into his bones. He hadn’t taken his medicine that morning, and his side was aching.
He needed to get them to shelter, but he wasn’t familiar with this part of the city. He had also given away the Gazette he had been carrying to a hysterical father with three daughters.
Forest dared to look over the hood of the motorcar. “We need to—”
A bomb exploded on the next street over. Bricks and shingles arced through the air. Splintered wood and fragments of glass and pieces of furniture spilled onto the road. Sarah cowered and screamed, but Forest never closed his eyes. He never let go of her hand, and through the smoke, he saw a clear path to a house with an open door.
He didn’t care if it was ordinary or enchanted. They needed cover.
Forest drew Sarah up and began to run, keeping her as close to his side as he could.
He glanced down at his shadow, spilling across the broken cobblestones and debris as he sprinted. He watched as his shadow grew two long wings, until it was not his shadow at all but that of something else, blocking the sun as if the moon had eclipsed it.
A cold shiver rattled his spine. He quickened their pace, looking up again, his eyes on that open door.
“Forest,” Sarah panted. “Forest, my dad!”
“We’re almost there. Keep running, Sarah.”
They were three strides away from the door when there was a startling bright light, as if a star had fallen. A pressure in his ears, a boom that he felt in his chest.
Even then, Forest never let go of her hand.
{50}
A Lullaby for Doomed Lovers
Roman had been sitting quiet as a statue for some time now, his eyes closed as the eithrals’ wings beat the air overhead, when he heard the distant note of a flute.
It startled him. He couldn’t keep his arms from jerking, the chains clanging in response.
One of the eithrals spotted the movement.