by Emily Colin
I curl into a ball, hands over my head to protect it. Eva, I think, my face pressed into the cracking earth as a fusillade of projectiles hurtles through the air, clipping my back hard enough to bruise. The force of the detonation resonates in my head, my chest, my bones. My ears ring in the wake of it, like they did in the aftermath of the bombing that destroyed the Brotherhood’s original camp and killed my mother. The bellators are screaming and the air is thick with blood and I can’t see anything but the smoke-stained dark—
Panic bubbles in my stomach, nauseating and unfamiliar. Then I feel a hand close around mine, pressing hard, steadying me. “Ari.” Eva’s voice comes to me as if from a great distance—but it is hers nonetheless. “Are you all right?”
I have to clear my throat twice before I can answer her, spitting dirt and blood onto the ground. “Fine. I’m fine.” My voice is a scrape. “And you?”
“Well enough. Jaxon?”
“I don’t know. He was with me and then—” I break off, coughing.
“I’m here.” It’s impossible to pinpoint the origin of his voice, what with the smoke and the chaos of the detonation—but then I feel the prod of his boot against my leg. He must have crawled through the detritus to reach us.
“Hurt?” I manage. My throat feels like it’s been scoured.
“Not badly.” His words devolve into a hacking, gravelly cough.
The hail of projectiles starts to settle. I get to my knees, bracing myself on the ground—and recoil as my hand encounters an object that’s at once slick, hard, and gristly…a severed limb, I realize. Bile rises in my throat, and I leap to my feet, heedless of the consequences, wiping my hand on my torn gear.
I can hear the surviving bellators—the ones who were behind the tripline’s charge—stirring. Through the haze of smoke and the roar of the fire I can make out the occasional word, mostly in the form of a half-delivered threat. If we’re recovering, so are they, and it would be a fool’s errand if we endured all of this for nothing. “Run,” I say, the word a clipped command.
Even in his altered state, I hear Jaxon snort, as if irritated by my order. I could care less what he thinks. Sometimes, in extremis, the obvious falls by the wayside, and we react by instinct, driven by fear or anger. Angry, fearful soldiers make stupid choices. This is why there are strategies and chains of command—and I’ll be damned if I consider Jaxon to be my superior.
We run for the clearing, climbing over trees that have fallen across the path, half-blinded by the smoke. The air clears the further we get from the encroaching flames, but not by much. Still, I can see Eva now—her hair torn loose from its braid, her face smudged with dirt and streaked with blood. Beside her, Jaxon is keeping pace, his left arm badly abraded. Between that and the shoulder wound he sustained in the fight, he’s got to be in pain, but to his credit, he doesn’t slow us down.
The damage to my leg from my encounter with the tree limb isn’t bad—more of an inconvenience than anything else. But my gear is torn, my face is scratched, Eva and Jaxon look like they’ve been through hell, and Camila, of course, is dead. When we skid, breathless, into the clearing, Ronan and the members of the Brotherhood look at us with horror.
“Camila?” Mateo says, but the emptiness in his voice tells me it’s a pro forma question.
Jaxon shakes his head, then doubles over, coughing, his hands on his knees—likely as much from a desire to hide his face than from the need to breathe.
“How?” Ronan says, the word rough-edged.
“Honorably.” It’s what I would want to know, if one of my brethren fell. “It was fast. She didn’t suffer.” Much, I think, thinking of the horrified look on her face before she tumbled into the muck.
Mei turns away, hand pressed to her mouth, but a sob escapes nonetheless. Ronan’s face is grim. “Are any of them still alive?” he says, cutting to the quick.
“Yes.” Eva’s voice is hoarse, but she’s the least winded of the three of us; Jaxon’s still hacking, and my lungs feel as if they are filled with ground glass. “I can’t tell how many. Eight, maybe more, by the sound of it. We need to go—and we need to ford the stream. Anything else, and they’ll track us.”
Ronan nods, a decisive gesture. “All right. Jaxon, tie off that wound and reload your weapon. Those of you who are unarmed, stay close to someone with a gun—or a blade,” he says, with a nod to myself and Eva. “Move out.”
We run downhill, through the winding trail that leads to the stream. The cool water is a welcome relief, and while the current tugs at me, eager, we’re just at the edge, knee-deep. By the time the stream begins to narrow and the land to rise, I can breathe freely again. And when the woods give way to rockfall and the water slows to a trickle, disappearing into the fissure between two large boulders, I feel my shoulders begin to relax.
We’ve lost them, at least for now. Together, we held off the Thirty.
I spare a moment to hope Kilían still lives, and to say the Bellatorum’s blessing for the dead: Integer vitae scelerisque purus. “Unimpaired by life and clean of wickedness,” it means. In a society where purity of body and mind are everything, there can be no greater accolade. Then I turn my face northward and start to climb.
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About the Author
Emily Colin's debut novel, The Memory Thief, was a New York Times bestseller and a Target Emerging Authors Pick. She is also the author of The Dream Keeper's Daughter and, for YA audiences, the Seven Sins series. In addition, Emily is the co-editor and a contributing writer for two YA fiction anthologies: Wicked South: Secrets and Lies and Unbound: Stories of Transformation, Love, and Monsters.
Emily's diverse life experience includes organizing a Coney Island tattoo and piercing show, hauling fish at a dolphin research center, roaming New York City as an itinerant teenage violinist, helping launch two small publishing companies, and working to facilitate community engagement in the arts. She teaches writing for Authors Publish and works as a freelance editor. Originally from Brooklyn, Emily lives in coastal North Carolina with her family. She loves chocolate, is addicted to tiramisu, and dislikes anything containing beans. You can find her at www.emilycolin.com.