by E. R. Arroyo
Down the hall and back toward the elevator, I hear ruckus in another lab. When we pass the open doorway, I see Nathan standing across the room and my father right by the door, both with guns drawn. Dad looks over his shoulder at me and Dylan. With blood and cuts on his face, he yells, “Go!” But I don’t go. Instead I enter the room, gun drawn, leaving Dylan at the door.
“I see you found my son, Dylan.” Nathan’s bloody, too. I’ve never been so proud of my father.
“Don’t you say his name. Don’t you dare.” I cock the gun.
“You really are a waste of a human being, you know that? All that passion, that rage. You’re nothing but a juvenile delinquent who can run fast.”
Maybe he’s right about what I am, but it doesn’t change what he is. “You’re a monster. You want to know why this is happening? Why we just evacuated half of your colony? Because you tried to turn them into nothing. You can’t just erase the human spirit. People need hope.”
“I never knew you to be one for thinking. Congratulations on finally developing a brain.”
“You’re a coward, you know. You’re such a poor leader you have to manipulate people into following you. I bet you were a nobody before the war. I bet no one cared about you at all. Especially not Cornelius.”
At the mention of his father, agony crosses his expression for a brief moment, then his face contorts like he’s losing control.
“You killed him didn’t you?” I take a step toward him with both hands on the gun. “Didn’t you?” I scream.
“Yes. And why stop there?” He takes the gun off my father and trains it on Dylan. As he pulls the trigger, I leap into the path and shield Dylan with my body. Two shots ring out and I clench all my muscles, but the pain doesn’t come.
I whip around and see my father slumped on the ground with two bullet holes in his chest.
Before my emotions can catch up to what I see, I unload my gun into Nathan’s chest. I keep pulling the trigger long after I’m out, long after he drops his gun and falls over. I barely register the gagging sounds he makes, until I realize my dad is making them, too.
I fall beside my father to find the wounds. Both bullets hit him in the chest, and blood stains the corners of his mouth. “Daddy, no!”
“Corinne, I’m so proud of you.” It’s barely a whisper, and his eyes strain to stay open.
Tears spill down my face as I press on his wounds. My voice is barely a whisper. “I can’t lose you again. We’re getting you out of here.” There’s no way I can carry him and Dylan.
“Baby, listen.” He strains to breathe. “No anger. Just hope. And let people help you.”
“No,” I cry with my head against his chest. Blood is everywhere. “I love you so much. You can’t go. Your people need you. I need you.”
“Everything I am, you can be. All that I’ve done, you can do even greater things.” He coughs and warm blood speckles my face.
“No, I can’t, Dad. I can’t.”
He forces out words between raspy attempts to breathe. “As long as you...fight for what’s right...people will follow... you.”
He’s wrong, I’m not a leader. I’ll never be as great as him. Never.
I lay against his chest, sobbing hysterically. He manages to lift an arm and stroke my hair once, then he stops moving. His chest stops rising and falling. His heart stops beating. I press my fingers to his neck to check for a pulse. I can’t leave him like this again, but he’s gone this time. Really gone.
Chapter Twenty-One
Dylan grabs me around the waist. He’s on his knees and barely able to hold himself up, but he tugs me toward the door. “No!” I scream and I grab my father’s hand one last time.
“We have to go,” Dylan mumbles. “We have to.” And he’s right. Together, we get to our feet. Stumbling down the hall, we cling to each other.
When we reach the elevator, I press the button. I help Dylan inside, then find Vance. He’s gone, too, and another wave hits me. Everyone I love is gone. Everyone but Dylan. I gag as I grab Vance’s body and drag him to the elevator.
I lift him to scan his chip, and then his fingerprint. I cry harder as I heave the body back into the hall and the elevator takes us up.
When we reach ground level, the battle still rages, and it’s gotten worse. We spill onto the ground behind enemy lines and half-walk, half-drag ourselves across the lawn, hoping to go unnoticed. Dylan gets stronger by the minute, and before long, he’s supporting his own weight. We jog toward the Underage center, hand-in-hand.
A bullet hits the ground in front of us. Then behind us. Then one hits my thigh and I go limp. Dylan keeps me on my feet, but I can’t put pressure on my leg.
“Ow, ow.”
He shakes his head, squeezing his eyes shut. I can tell he’s fighting off the drug.
“I need you to carry me. Please.” I clear my throat, tears stinging my eyes. “Help me.”
He grunts as he lifts me, and I wrap my arms around his neck to help with the weight. We move slowly, at first, but he tries to pick up the pace. I don’t know how we manage not to get shot again.
“You can’t die, too, Dylan. Promise me. I can’t lose you.” I know I’m delirious, but I can’t help it. Pain radiates through my entire body, and I think I’m more injury than anything else at this point.
“I promise,” he says through gritted teeth. When a soldier comes after us, Dylan fires my gun and the soldier stops.
As we turn back toward the Underage center--toward freedom--Captain Marsiana stands in front of us with her gun drawn and aimed at Dylan’s head. He stops cold as panic overtakes us both.
I can’t find the strength to speak, but I look in her eyes, begging silently for her to let us go.
“Take me with you.” She waits for me to nod before lowering her weapon and covering us the rest of the way to the hole in the fence. She fires so many shots I lose count, and eventually Dylan carries me through one of the massive openings Max’s men made.
No man’s land is covered in broken mines, and from the bodies we pass, I can see that several of them were successful.
Dylan takes me all the way through the perimeter and into the woods. With Marsi on our heels, he carries me all the way to the campsite, whispering things along the way like, “Stay with me,” and “Almost there.” I cling to his shirt when he sets me down, not wanting to let him go.
Max rushes to us. “Where’s Anthony?”
A squall escapes me and I begin to sob all over again. I lost my father.
Twice.
“He was killed, sir.” Dylan’s words are strained, but he keeps his hands gently on my shoulders. “She’s been shot in the leg.”
Max nods, fighting back some sort of emotion on his face. With his jaw clenched and his mouth set in a tight line, he kneels and assesses my gunshot wound. “It’s through and through. We’ll get her fixed up in Mercy.”
All around us, women and children are loaded into trucks, vans, and busses, along with wounded soldiers. Our mission was a success. Yet it was the most painful success I’ve ever known, or could imagine knowing.
Dylan lifts me again, and I groan. Then he sets me inside a car and climbs in beside me. After wiping blood off both our faces, he holds me, comforts me, until the vehicles start moving out. I hope we’re not leaving anyone behind.
I lay against Dylan’s chest with a fistful of his shirt, and he keeps his arms tight around me. As we drive straight through to Mercy, I fall in and out of consciousness and only vaguely remember Dylan wrapping my leg with something.
“Something’s not right,” Dylan mutters.
Max eyes him through the rearview mirror. “What’s not right?”
“There should have been more soldiers than that. There should have been a lot more. We should have been outnumbered.”
“So where were they, then?” Max glances over his shoulder briefly at us, then puts his eyes back on the road.
“Good question.”
When we arrive at Mercy, I�
�m taken to a large space with a million tiny cots where the wounded soldiers are being brought in. It takes a minute for me to realize why I’m here: I’m one of them.
I grab Dylan’s wrist. “You have to warn them about the withdrawals...the women.”
“I will.” He kneels beside my cot. “I wish you hadn’t come back for me. He’d still be--”
“No.” I prop up on an elbow with quite a bit of pain from a million injuries. “Don’t. He didn’t die for you, he died for me.”
“Because you almost died for me.”
“Regardless.” Tears sting my eyes, but I try to bat them away. “I couldn’t leave Antius without you. Not the first time, and not this time.” I grab the back of his neck and pull his forehead to mine. “It’s you and me,” I whisper then kiss his lips.
I wrap my arms around him and feel something wet on his back. I pull my hand away, and it’s covered in red.
“Turn around.” I pull his shirt up and find a gunshot wound in the flesh below his shoulder blade. “You’re hit.”
He slumps onto the cot next to mine, groaning. “I know. It hurt like hell.”
For the longest time, we lie on our sides facing each other, and if so many lives weren’t lost today--especially my father’s--I think I might be happy. And someday I believe I will be. Because I choose it.
I choose hope.
Dylan and I both go through simple surgeries and come out with a few stitches, including the ones on Dylan’s eyebrow, and now we’re resting in a recovery room with about fourteen other patients. Dylan made them scoot our beds close enough that we could hold hands, but they forbade us from moving more than that. And I wouldn’t want to. Purple-yellow bruises cover my ribcage, front and back, and several mark my face as well. I have a gunshot wound in one leg, and a stab wound from the metal fence scrap in the other. No, I don’t want to move.
There’s a tap near the doorway, and Max stands there. His face is drawn, and he approaches slowly. I try to sit up, but piercing pains keep me still.
“How you feeling?” Max holds his hands behind his back. He looks weird without a gun.
“Like death,” I say, with as much of a smirk as I can muster.
A tiny grin comes and goes in a second. “We saved one hundred and ninety-six. Women, children, and even a few men.”
“Losses?” I feel helpless lying here.
“We count thirty-six missing from our ranks.” He dips his head, looking at the ground I guess.
“I’m sorry about your men.”
“It was a good sacrifice,” he says. “And so was your father’s.”
I’m not worth my father’s death. And I only just got him back. I shake my head, watching him through mounds of tears pooling in my eyes.
“He believed in you, Corinne. And so do I.”
“Thank you, Max.”
He nods. “You were right, you know,” he says, shifting his attention to Dylan. “About the soldiers.”
“What happened?” He sits up even though he shouldn’t.
“Last night when we attacked Antius, they attacked The City.” My thoughts immediately jump to Tyce and his precious baby girl. And all those people, Tyce’s family.
“What does that mean?” I groan while I sit up, too. I can’t just lay here.
“It means we’re not done fighting.”
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Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One