He stared at her panic, at her pain, and wished there was another fate for her, for them.
“I’m at peace with that.” He searched her face for the last time. “I love you. I wish there was more for us—”
“Come with me!”
“Go! I’ll find you.”
It was a lie, of course. The chances of him getting to those bones and getting out in time? Less than zero—and he knew damn well she was doing that math in her head, too.
She paused for one last heartbeat. “I won’t forget you. I promise.”
He closed his eyes as pain lanced through him. When he reopened them, she was entering the escape tunnel.
She didn’t look back and that gave him comfort. She was a fighter, and she was going to make it—and he almost pitied Chalen. The conqueror was not going to live through what that female was going to do to him.
Turning away, Duran broke out into a sprint and headed back for the Dhavos’s private quarters.
He couldn’t leave his mahmen’s bones behind—even if she technically wasn’t there anymore. That Fade ceremony was going to happen or he was going to die trying to get what he needed for it.
He might have sacrificed the chance to kill his father to help Ahmare.
But this was different.
Ahmare ran through the escape tunnel like her life depended on it because duh.
And she found the first of the bodies about halfway to the vault door. It was one of Chalen’s guards, curled on his side and unmoving, the scent of blood thick as if his throat had been cut.
She didn’t waste any time checking into the particulars with her cell phone’s light.
That alarm grew dimmer the farther she went out, but that was a function of distance, not a change in detonation. She jumped over the second of the bodies. Another guard. More blood. And a third.
The fourth was just as she came up to the vault, the robes pooled around the cooling corpse.
There was only one explanation: As Duran’s father had escaped, he’d been good with a knife, even in his weakened state.
He’d also closed the heavy steel door, and her hands shook as she trained her light at the keypad and punched in the series of numbers.
And the pound key.
Ahmare’s eyes were teary, and her heart was skipping beats as she prayed that the—
The rumble was dull at first. Very distant, like thunder still miles away. But the earth shook under her feet.
The explosions were starting to go off.
“Damn it! Work!” She punched in the code and hit the pound key. “Come on!”
Another rumble, more tremors, and now there were cracks and creaks in the tunnel, fine dust coming down and making her eyes sting.
“You have to work!” As she tried a third time, her eyes teared up as she remembered Duran saying the exact same thing.
But maybe those were the magic words needed because the vault lock sprang, the air lock hissed, and Ahmare yanked open the steel panel.
Bars. There were bars blocking the way out. Bars that had come down and were covered with a steel mesh that meant she could not dematerialize away.
She was trapped, either because his father had known this was the way they would try to get out, or because this was part of the doomsday scenario, a safeguard to make sure that even if the hemlock didn’t work on everyone, there wouldn’t be any survivors.
“No!” she screamed as part of the ceiling collapsed on her head.
30
AHMARE PULLED AGAINST THE bars. Scratched at the steel mesh. Screamed in frustration and dropped her phone because she needed both hands to try to get through the grating more than she needed illumination.
The explosions were getting closer, and the collapse that was happening deep inside the colony was creating a hot, front draft of wind that pushed against her body. The smell of gunpowder and chemicals, of electrical burn and earth, of linoleum on fire and wood as well, made her panic like an animal.
She couldn’t believe this was how she was going to die. Here, in the almost-out, on the very verge of freedom and safety.
Ahmare yelled again even though there was no one to hear her, the heat making her sweat under the windbreaker, her mind splitting so that it felt as though a calm part of her was watching her struggle.
It was that section of her brain that went to her parents. Had this been what it was like for them when they’d been murdered? Had they struggled against the lessers as the attack happened, fighting in an untrained way against a greater, better-equipped killer, falling down, succumbing to mortal wounds . . . as a version of themselves played witness, marveling that it was happening in this way.
That in this particular fashion, they were leaving the earth.
Did everyone think that at the end? Especially if it was unexpected, an attack, an accident?
“Help!” she screamed—
The flare of flame on the far side of the bars came out of nowhere. One second, it was all black on the other side, her beam having settled so it faced her boots. The next, there was a very distinct, totally controlled blue flame floating in front of her.
“Get back.”
The voice was female.
“Nexi?”