She spins down. Bullets force me to crouch beside her. Concrete rains. She spits blood and there’s a wet, phlegmy echoing to her breath.
“It’s in my lung,” she gasps as she fumbles with a stimshot from her leg pouch. Were the circuits of her armor not fried, meds would inject automatically. But she has to crack open the case and pull a dose manually. I help, pulling free one of the micro-syringes and injecting her in the neck. Her pupils dilate and her breath slows as the narcotic drifts through her blood. Beside me, Victra’s eyes are closed.
The gunfire stops. Carefully, I peek out. The Jackal’s Grays hide behind concrete walls and pylons across the bridge, some sixty meters away. Trigg reloads. The wind is the only sound. Something’s wrong. I search the sky, fearing the quiet. A Gold is coming. I can feel it in the battle’s pulse.
“Trigg!” I shout till my body shudders. “Run!”
Holiday sees the look on my face. She struggles up, wheezing in pain as Trigg abandons his cover,
boots slipping on the ice-slicked bridge. He falls and gains his feet, scrambling toward us, terrified.
Too late. Behind him, Aja au Grimmus rips out of the fortress’s door, past the Grays, past the Obsidians who lurk in the shadows. She’s in her black formal jacket. Her long legs reel Trigg in now.
It’s one of the saddest sights I’ve ever seen.
I fire my pistol. Holiday unloads her rifle. We hit nothing but air. Aja sidesteps, twists, and, when Trigg is ten paces from us, spears him through the torso with her razor. Metal glistens wetly from his sternum. Shock widens his eyes. His mouth makes a quiet gasp. And he screams as he’s hauled into the air. Pried upward by Aja’s razor like a twitching pond frog on the end of a makeshift spear.
“Trigg…” Holiday whispers.
I stumble forward, toward Aja, pulling my razor, but Holiday jerks me back behind the wall as bullets from the distant Grays rip into the concrete around us. Her blood melts the snow under her.
“Don’t be stupid,” she snarls, dragging me to the ground with the last of her strength. “We can’t help him.”
“He’s your brother!”
“He’s not the mission. You are.”
“Darrow!” Aja calls from the bridge. Holiday peers out where Aja stands with her brother, her face bloodless and quiet. The knight holds Trigg up on the end of her razor with one hand. Trigg wriggles on the blade. Sliding down it toward her grip. “My goodman, the time for hiding behind others is over. Come out.”
“Don’t,” Holiday murmurs.
“Come out,” Aja says. And she tosses Trigg off her blade over the side of the bridge. He falls two hundred meters before his body splits against a granite ledge below.
Holiday makes a sick choking sound. She brings up her empty rifle and pulls the trigger a dozen
times in Aja’s direction. Aja ducks before realizing Holiday’s weapon is empty. I pull Holiday down as a sniper ’s bullet aimed at her chest slams into her gun, shattering it and kicking it from her grip, mangling a finger. We sit shivering, backs to concrete, Victra between us.
“I’m sorry,” I manage. She doesn’t hear me. Her hands shake worse than mine. No tears in her distant eyes. No color in her lined face.
“They’ll come,” she says after a hollow moment. Her eyes following the green smoke. “They have
to.” Blood leaks through her clothing and out the corner of her mouth before freezing halfway down her neck. She grips her boot knife and tries to rise, but her body is done. Breaths wet and thick, smelling like copper. “They’ll come.”
“What is the plan?” I ask her. Her eyes close. I shake her. “How will they come?”
She nods to the edge of the landing pad. “Listen.”
“Darrow!” Cassius’s voice calls over the wind. He’s joined Aja. “Darrow of Lykos, come out!” His
rich voice is unfit for this moment. Too regal and high and untouched by the sadness that swallows us.
I wipe the tears from my eyes. “You must decide what you are in the end, Darrow. Will you come out like a man? Or must we dig you out like a rat from a cave?”
The anger tightens my chest, but I don’t want to stand. Once I would have, when I wore the armor
of Gold and thought I would tower over Eo’s killer and reveal my true self as his cities burned and their Color fell. But that armor is gone. That mask of the Reaper gnawed away by doubt and darkness.
I am just a boy, and I shiver and cower and hide from my enemy because I know the price of failure, and I am so very afraid.
But I will not let them take me. I will not be their victim, and I will not let Victra fall into their hands again.
“Slag this,” I say. I grab Holiday’s collar and Victra’s hand and, eyes flashing with the strain, blinded by the sun on the snow, face numb, I drag them with all my strength from our hiding place across the landing pad to the far edge where the wind roars.