by Kyla Stone
He’d lived with that horror—that guilt—every single day for over six months.
Some death was inevitable. He knew that. The evil in this world used violence as its weapon. To fight evil, violence was necessary. But he would never again blindly follow any cause or leader. He would never again act against his own conscience.
He knew himself, and he knew his code. He would do everything in his power to never kill an innocent—or to allow innocents to be killed under his watch.
There would be consequences. Of that, he was certain.
Consequences be damned.
“No!” Gabriel tackled Cerberus and hurled him to the ground. He wrenched the gun from Cerberus’s hands and smashed the butt across his nose. “They’re just kids!”
Cerberus grunted. Blood streamed from his broken nose and leaked over his lips. He wiped at it with a furious grimace. “It had to be done.”
Gabriel looked up in alarm. The woman was half-slumped over the rampart, unmoving. The children were no longer visible. Behind where they had stood only a moment ago, two sprays of bright red blood smeared the carapace of the cannon.
He hadn’t been able to save them.
“When are you gonna learn?” Cleo snarled into his comm. “Anyone not us is the enemy. It’s kill or be killed!”
There was no time to react. No time to let the true horror of it sink in.
The chopper roared closer, rising above the plasma wall.
“Retreat!” Jamal screamed into his comm. “The last cannon is still active!”
But it was too late. The cannon swiveled. Fired. The missile streaked toward the chopper.
The missile struck the cockpit and exploded in a fiery blast. The second shot tore an enormous, jagged hole in the metal frame. Smoke poured from the cabin and exploded windows. The shriek of tearing metal and shattering glass rent the air.
The chopper spun, trailing thick black smoke as it groaned and shrieked. It careened over the plasma wall, jerking crazily, rotors spinning uselessly. It plunged to the ground in a cacophony of screeching, groaning metal.
The chopper was no longer recognizable as anything other than a charred and broken wreck of machinery. General Reaver and everyone inside that hoverchopper were dead.
Jamal’s eyes widened in stunned disbelief. “I’m going in!”
“No!” Gabriel shouted. “They’re already gone!”
Jamal didn’t listen. Maybe he didn’t even hear Gabriel’s warning. He ran out from the shelter of the shield wings. On the other side of the flaming wreckage, a Coalition soldier took aim with a pulse rifle.
“Jamal!” Gabriel rose to his knees, gun lifted. He peered through the scope, but the smoke and rippling heat from the blaze distorted his view. He fired. Missed. Aimed again.
The Coalition soldier fired. The blast slammed into Jamal’s chest. A second and third blast followed in immediate succession. The blow knocked him off his feet. Jamal landed on his back, smoke hissing from his mangled sternum. His armored vest had withstood the first blast, but the barrage had been too much.
Jamal Carter gazed blankly up at the sky. His eyes were open but dull and unseeing. Around his neck, the white rabbit’s foot was black with soot, drenched in blood.
Gabriel stared in horror.
“You did this!” Cleo screamed into Gabriel’s ear. “You killed my mother!”
“I didn’t!” Gabriel choked out.
“That cannon shouldn’t have worked!”
Sorrow skewered him at the pain and anguish in her voice. “I didn’t intend—”
“You bastard.” Her breath hitched, breaking off a sob. “If you see me, you better run. The next time I see you, I’ll kill you. First Sloane, then I’m coming for you.”
Gabriel knew she meant every word.
20
Amelia
The explosion blasted Amelia off her feet. Heat struck her with the force of a brick wall. She went flying backward. She landed hard on her back on the platform, the wind knocked out of her lungs.
Something heavy pressed against her. She gasped for breath, forcing herself to feel her arms, her stomach, her thighs, her scalp. A tiny piece of shrapnel bit into her shin, another her calf. She was lucky. The guard who’d been dragging her off the stage wasn’t. His body had protected hers from the blast.
The entire square was hazy with smoke. Her ears rang.
She pushed the guard’s body off—it wasn’t Hogan or Harper, she realized dully—and stumbled to her feet.
In the square, people were screaming, shoving, running in every direction. Hundreds of people shrieking in terror, grabbing their children, fleeing for their lives. Panic and chaos spread from the square like a terrible cancer.
Ash and dust and smoke drifted in the air. Several bodies littered the platform. Across the snow-covered grass a few dozen yards away, Senator Steelman clutched at General Daugherty, holding him up as blood dribbled down his left leg. Their clothes were torn and blackened with soot.
Someone groaned at her feet. She looked down. A guard clutched an arm that was no longer there. Blood was everywhere. Too much. There was nothing she could do.
“I’m—sorry.” She turned away, sickened and horrified.
Vera lay collapsed on the platform, half-covered by a female guard missing a chunk of her head. Amelia knelt beside them. She pushed the guard off Vera’s body.
Blood and soot streaked the woman’s face. She wasn’t moving. Her tight bun had come loose. Several strands of her black hair were snagged in one of her earrings. A spiraling snowflake landed on her cheek, melting instantly. More snow fell from the sky, thick and silent.
Amelia pressed two fingers to Vera’s throat. Nothing. She was gone.
Amelia rocked back on her heels. A dark sucking energy tunneled through her insides, threatening to pull her under like a black hole.
Movement snagged the corner of her eye. She turned around. President Sloane was hobbling up the marble steps of BioGen headquarters, followed by her hulking head of security, Bale.
“Amelia!”
She turned back slowly, painfully. This was a dream, a horrible nightmare, something too terrible and ugly to be real. But she of all people knew better. It was all too real.
“Amelia!” Below the platform, fighting against the crowd of bodies, she glimpsed Micah and Silas.
They were here. They were coming for her.
“Amelia!” another voice called her—this one closer, hoarse and rusty with pain. Her father, still on his knees in the ruin of the platform, blood smearing his face, staining his chest, dripping onto the platform. Shrapnel jutted from his shoulders, torso, and upper thighs.
She froze, horrified.
Declan laughed. It was an awful, grating rasp. He shifted, jerking his chains, but they wouldn’t give an inch. His guards were dead or had fled from the platform, but he was still trapped. “I knew you’d survive. You always were stronger than I gave you credit for.” He coughed, blood bubbling from his mouth. “Stronger than your mother ever was.”
Micah scrambled onto the platform. Silas was right behind him. He leaned down and grasped her shoulders. His glasses were skewed, his wavy hair disheveled, but it was Micah. He’d come for her.
“We have to go!” he yelled in her face.
Everywhere was chaos. Explosions booming in the distance. Soldiers running, shooting. People screaming, ducking, fleeing for cover. Smoke spewing in a thickening haze.
“Amelia! Don’t leave me!” Declan shouted. His voice was full of fear and desperation. “Help me!”
“We have to go!” Micah grabbed her arms. Still numb, stunned, her ears ringing, she managed to nod. He pulled her to her feet and half-dragged her down the platform stairs.
“What the hell happened?” Silas demanded.
“Kadek told us it was a flash bomb.” Micah hooked his arm around her waist, propping her up. She leaned gratefully against his shoulder. “He said it would stun them, create confusion, not kill anyone. Something
happened.”
“The little ferret-faced snot betrayed us, is what happened.” Silas scowled. “I’m gonna kill him.”
A Coalition soldier shouted at them from the platform, stumbling down the steps, a gun gripped in one hand. Silas aimed, about to shoot him.
“No!” Amelia croaked. She lurched forward and grabbed Silas’s arm. “That’s Hogan. He—he helped me.”
Silas didn’t lower his gun. He stared at Hogan warily. “Whose side are you on?”
“The side of the truth.” Hogan raised his hands, palms out, though he didn’t drop his gun. His jaw was set, his expression impassive, but those green eyes flashed with anger—and defiance. “I suspected something about the required anti-viral shots. Amelia helped me put the pieces together. And what she said today on that platform—she’s right. We can do better than this.”
“Silas,” Micah said. “Amelia vouches for him.”
Silas lowered his gun. “Alright, then. Welcome to the club.”
Their voices came distant and fuzzy. It was hard to make sense of their words. All she could see was her father chained to the platform, his stricken face, his terror.
“We’re too exposed out here,” Hogan said. “The skirmish at the gate is moving further in. We’ve got to go.”
Micah kept his arm around her as they hobbled across the grass. Amelia took five steps. Ten. She turned back, twisting from Micah’s arms. “We shouldn’t let him die like that.”
Silas grabbed her other hand. “This isn’t the time to get all nostalgic, Amelia. He deserves to die—”
“No.” She shook him off. It didn’t matter what her father had done. She couldn’t just walk away. “Not like this.”
Amelia turned back toward the platform.
“Amelia!” Declan croaked. Blood trickled from the corner of his split and swollen lips. “I’m—I’m sorry. Go. Go now. Leave me.”
Despite the fact that her father had purposefully killed thousands of people, had manipulated and bullied and abused his own family, despite everything—the emotion shining in his eyes now could only be called love.
A broken, twisted love, but still there, in this moment, in this rare burst of humanity. It was in his blackened eyes, his stricken face, his hoarse, hopeless voice. It was real.
A grenade whistled through the air. It landed on the platform only a few feet from Declan.
“Down!” Micah cried. He shoved her in the back, knocking her to the ground. She landed hard, pain biting into her knees, elbows, and hips. She stayed down. Trampled grass and snow pressed against her face. Gasping and terrified, she wrapped her arms over her head.
A deafening explosion trembled the air. A wave of heat blasted over her. She shook, eyes squeezed shut, ears ringing. She dragged in a scorched breath. Then another. Her eyebrows—her whole face—felt singed. But she was alive.
After several excruciating seconds that felt like years, she crawled to her hands and knees, then limped to her feet. She coughed, her throat seared, and peered through the billowing smoke, searching frantically for her father.
The whole right side of the platform blazed with searing white-hot flames. The fire engulfed everything, surging fifteen feet high. She could barely make him out through the roaring flames and billowing smoke. Her father writhed and screamed in anguish as he burned.
There was no way to reach him, to help him.
“No!” she screamed.
Silas lifted his gun. He hesitated, hands trembling. Unable to make the shot. Pain and dread swirled in her brother’s eyes. He wanted to put their father out of his misery. In the end, he couldn’t do it. Just like she couldn’t just leave her father behind.
Micah placed his hand on Silas’s arm and slowly lowered his gun hand. “Let me.”
It was Micah who took the shot.
Declan’s head slumped to his chest. His screams went mercifully silent.
Her father was dead.
Something cold and hard shattered inside her chest.
“Are you okay?” Micah grasped her shoulders and shook her. “Amelia!”
She looked from Micah to Silas. Her bones were brittle as air. A dull, nameless grief sucked at the edges of her mind. She blinked against the snowflakes landing on her eyelashes.
She couldn’t let herself break. She wouldn’t break. Not here. Not now. Not at all.
Silas reached for her hand and squeezed it. His gray eyes shone with unshed tears.
She squeezed back. “I’m—I’m okay. Are you?”
Silas nodded.
“We’re okay,” she said. She wasn’t sure if it was true. If anything would ever be okay again.
Micah spun around. “We have to get you somewhere safe.”
“No.” Amelia shook off her grief. She would mourn later. There was too much to do now. Too much at stake.
She picked up a spherical object from the ground and dusted it off against the hem of her scarlet dress, ignoring the soot and ash stains, the streaks of dirt marring the silk. The tiny light blinked. It still worked. “Sloane fled into BioGen. We need her.”
Silas checked his ammo. “In case you haven’t noticed, this is a war zone.”
“We need to get you somewhere safe,” Hogan said.
“You need to hide inside the capitol until this is all over,” Micah said.
“Sloane is the key.” Amelia wrenched the handgun from Micah’s holster with numbed fingers she could barely feel. “We can’t let her get away.”
The thudding roar of a hoverchopper filled the air, coming from the direction of the gates somewhere behind them.
Amelia craned her neck toward the sky. Amelia, Micah, Silas, and Hogan all watched as the hoverchopper thundered toward the Sanctuary, darting through the gray sky like an elegant but lethal bird of prey.
Micah gestured at the tail fin, painted with a red circle with a raised fist inside it. The Patriots insignia. “It’s one of ours.”
The chopper rose rapidly, banked, and headed toward the plasma wall.
“Look!” Amelia cried, pointing.
On the ramparts, one cannon was still moving.
Micah gaped. “It’s supposed to be down! All the cannons are supposed to be down!”
“That one clearly is not,” Hogan said.
The cannon fired. The chopper exploded in a blaze of smoke and fire. Twisted metal shrieked as it spiraled crazily, tilted on its side, rotors chopping as it spun over the plasma wall and crashed to the ground.
21
Gabriel
Gabriel jerked Cerberus to his feet, hauled him around the corner of the nearest building, and slammed him against the wall. He pressed the muzzle of his gun against Cerberus’s head. “You just killed innocent kids!”
“Reaver and everyone on that chopper are dead because you wouldn’t!”
Gabriel winced. He was deeply sorry that General Reaver and everyone on that chopper had died. But he would never condone murdering children. Never again. “That’s not who we are.”
“That’s who everyone is!” Cerberus spat. He tried to jerk away from Gabriel’s grasp, but Gabriel jerked him back, shoving his head against the wall. “You. Me. The whole world. In the end, we’re all just animals. We do whatever it takes to survive.”
“No. There is a cost that’s too high. There is a line. If we cross it, we’re no different than the people we hate.”
“Pretty speech.” A vicious smile twisted Cerberus’s lips. Blood trickled down the side of his temple from a gash in his forehead. “What now? You going to kill me? Is that it?”
Gabriel stared at him. He was so close he could see the pores in the man’s nose, the bloodshot veins spidering the whites of his eyes, the digital tattoos on his neck throbbing with his pulse. Cerberus was so much smaller, so much less intimidating without his white wolfskin cape. He was just a man now, fragile, made of flesh and bone and blood just like the rest of them.
Cerberus licked the blood smeared over his teeth. “You’ve been waiting for this for a long t
ime, haven’t you?”
“Shut up!”
“Ever since that little Middle Eastern girl, right?”
Gabriel ground the gun’s muzzle against his head. “I said shut up!”
“We aren’t so different, you and I,” Cerberus said. “We’re both trying to build a new society out of chaos, to create something better.”
“We’re nothing alike, you misogynistic, murderous asshole.”
“Order is necessary. Hierarchy is the natural way of things, of nature and everything else. Alphas are meant to rule. They’re meant to kill any threat. It’s what we do. You can’t blame a beast for acting on instinct, can you? That’s all we are, teeth and claws and instinct. That’s all I am. That’s all you are. And you know it.”
Rage thrummed through every cell in Gabriel’s body. Nadira’s scrap of blue cloth smoldered in his pocket. The overwhelming desire for vengeance slammed through him like a jackhammer. He could taste the coppery tang of it on his tongue.
Cerberus’s storm-blue eyes glinted. “I told you that we were the same, you and I.”
Gabriel’s hands shook. His fury nearly blinded him. One tiny nudge of his finger, and this monster would be wiped from the face of the earth.
He stepped back, angled the gun, and pulled the trigger.
Cerberus howled in agony. He slid down against the wall, clutching his right leg. His kneecap was an explosion of blood, tissue, and gristle.
Gabriel slammed the barrel of his gun against the side of Cerberus’s skull. The man slumped, unconscious. Gabriel yanked a pair of handcuffs dangling from the belt of a dead guard lying a few yards away and slapped them on Cerberus’s wrists. Then he dragged him to the destroyed tank and shoved his body into the relative safety of the space beneath it.
Micah was right. There had to be more. Killing Cerberus wouldn’t bring Nadira back. It had taken all this time for him to admit it to himself, but he knew the truth. Nadira never would have condoned such violence. She wouldn’t have wanted him to murder anyone, not even Cerberus.
