by Kit Rocha
“Come on!” Reyes shouted, reaching out. He guided Deacon’s body into the van, leaving room for Hunter and Zeke to hop in. Zeke reached out for Ana and hauled her in just as Laurel slammed her foot on the gas.
The van shot forward, careening straight for the fence, and Ana dropped to Deacon’s side and covered his body with hers as they crashed into it. Metal gave way with a screech. The van shuddered, and Deacon groaned again.
“I know,” she whispered, though she knew he couldn’t hear her. God, his face was a bloody mess. His nose was broken--again--and one of his eyes had swollen shut. He had gouges on his cheek, and his throat bore bruises as if someone had tried to choke him. She didn’t want to guess at how many ribs were broken, or how much pain he was in.
But he was alive. And Kora could heal anything.
Lucio’s van followed them through the hole in the fence and skidded out onto the cracked asphalt. They were picking up speed now that they were on the open road--and just in time.
A muffled explosion sounded. The road began to tremble beneath the van, and Ana twisted to look through the back doors.
The side of the mountain just...caved in, like someone had pulled the lowest card from a precarious tower built of them. It sank in on itself, an eye winking shut, and every trace of the Kings’ bunker simply vanished beneath a wave of rock and sand.
“Jesus Christ,” Hunter muttered. “Jesus fucking Christ.”
“I guess that’s the end of Seth,” Zeke muttered. “No one’s coming out of there.”
“Deacon had already ended Seth,” Ana said, lifting herself gingerly away from him. Her hand was steady as she wrapped her fingers around her boot knife and used it to slice open Deacon’s shirt, but underneath--
Oh Saints, his skin was nothing but a patchwork of darkening bruises and split skin. The first-aid kits were back with their bikes, but even those would have been insufficient to deal with the inevitable internal injuries. “Zeke--”
“I’m on it.” She heard rustling, and Zeke knelt at Deacon’s other side. He thrust a roll of duct tape at her before stripping off his shirt and ripping it to make a bandage for the wound on Deacon’s side. “We’ll deal with what we can until we get him to Kora. He’s strong, Ana. He’ll make it.”
“I know.” She stroked the hair on his forehead--the only part of him that, though bruised, didn’t seem terrifyingly fragile--and knew that if he was awake, he’d be furious with her. She had risked her life, along with Hunter’s and Zeke’s, to go back in after him.
But the writhing shame she’d felt at Gideon’s reprimand was nowhere to be found. They could shout at her, punish her, strip her of her place in the Riders, and she wouldn’t regret her choice. She’d make it again, every damn time.
Deacon’s life was worth the risk. Even if he never spoke to her again, never forgave her...
That was better than having to live the rest of her life never being able to forgive herself.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Deacon wasn’t scared of pain.
He wouldn’t call it an old friend, but it did firmly qualify as his frequent companion. He’d known it in all its forms--the sharp pierce of loss, the gnawing ache of hunger and hopelessness. The dull grind of bruised flesh and fractured bone.
But he’d never known it like this, screeching and dissonant, a thousand tiny, raking claws ripping him apart from the inside, sheltered and fed by the darkness he couldn’t seem to escape.
Is this hell? He tried to form the words, screamed them into the perfectly black abyss that surrounded him. Trapped him.
“He’s coming around.” Light stabbed at his eyes. “The anesthesia must be wearing off. Increase the dose--carefully.”
Deacon fought--he wasn’t sure why, because he didn’t think he could move or speak. But he fought all the same.
Strong hands pressed down on his shoulders. Ashwin’s face swam into blurry focus. “It’s okay,” he said firmly. “Deacon, you’re all right. Everyone got out. Everyone’s safe.”
Safe. He clutched at the word, carried it back down with him as he slipped into the gloom once more.
Safe.
»»» § «««
A gentle, steady symphony of whooshes and beeps lured Deacon out of the darkness.
He fluttered his eyes open, braced against the discomfort, but it hurt less this time. So he pressed his cheek harder into the soft pillow under his head and opened them again.
Gabe lay in the bed beside his, utterly still except for the slow rise and fall of his chest. A woman slept with her face pillowed on Gabe’s unmoving hand, dark brown hair streaked with pink spread over the colorful blanket.
Laurel. Deacon’s brain automatically identified the visitor. Then, as if even that had exhausted him, he fell unconscious again.
»»» § «««
“...going to be okay. So is Gabe.”
Ana. Soft, familiar fingers stroked over his forehead, tangling with his hair.
“I’d do it again, Deacon. I don’t care what happens. You were worth the risk.”
Now, for the first time since he opened his eyes and saw Ashwin, it hurt to fall away into nothingness.
»»» § «««
Twenty years of friendship closer to brotherhood had taught Deacon many things about Gideon, but nothing more than this: his taste in literature could best be described as eclectic.
Put plainly, sometimes it was essentially shit.
It was pretty good reading today--Shakespeare, which Deacon usually enjoyed. Except that Gideon liked to choose his material like he was wielding a hammer.
“For it falls out that what we have we prize not to the worth whiles we enjoy it, but being lacked and lost, why, then we rack the value, then we find the virtue that possession would not show us while it was ours.”
Deacon managed to speak. “Subtle. Real subtle.”
Gideon glanced up with a soft smile. “You know, this was always my favorite of Shakespeare’s comedies. Most people wouldn’t believe it, but Beatrice always reminded me of Isabela and the way she and John went at it when their courtship started. His parents commanded, and so did ours--and neither of them appreciated commands.”
“Your hell-raising sister and Gabe’s hell-raising brother?” Deacon’s throat was dry and raspy, and he licked his lips. “Never.”
Gideon picked up a glass of water with a straw and leaned forward to offer it to him. “Nobody remembers them that way anymore. Sixteen years of longing looks and wise leadership and wedded bliss tend to change the narrative, I suppose.”
“We still remember.” The word snagged on Deacon’s consciousness--something else he was supposed to remember. “Seth.”
“Ana said she saw his body.” Gideon paused. Sighed. “Hunter told me the rest. What he said to you.”
“Someone hired them to kill off the Riders.” Deacon could barely believe it himself. “It could be bullshit, some line he was using to taunt me.”
“You’d know better than anyone. Do you think he was taunting you?”
No. Seth could lie as easily as most people breathed, but when he spoke about the contract on the Riders, the words had sounded...sincere. Real. “I think...we should be sure.”
“Then we will be. After you’ve recovered.” Gideon set the water down, picked up his book, and tapped his fingers on the cover. “I sent Ana to clean up and get some rest. She wanted to wait until you woke up, but I know you two have had some tension. I thought it best to give you a little time.”
Deacon didn’t have to ask to know what had happened--the rest of the Riders had disobeyed his orders to keep themselves alive, even if it meant sacrificing him. “Was it her?” he asked. He didn’t want to, but he had to. “Was she the one who wouldn’t leave me behind?”
“I haven’t accepted her mission report yet. But, according to Hunter, yes. Zeke managed to pick up the tracking signal from your comms unit once you got outside the door, and Ana brought him and Hunter with her to retrieve you.”
“I asked th
em not to. Ordered them not to.”
“She made a judgment call. It turned out to be a smart one. But I understand it could have gone the other way, as well.” Gideon caught his gaze. Held it. “You have to decide how you feel about that, professionally and personally. I can’t decide for you.”
Someone had to. Deacon had been so prepared for the end that he still wasn’t one hundred percent sure he wasn’t imagining all of this. That the Suicide Kings’ compound hadn’t fallen down around him, after all. The only thing tripping him up was the question of where he could possibly be. It wasn’t hell, surely, because apparently Ana existed.
And it couldn’t be heaven, because she wasn’t in his arms.
“I was ready, Gideon.” He could barely grind out the words. “I was ready, and now I don’t--I don’t know if I can ever be okay with it again. Not if I have to know this--that Ana would walk into a building that’s about to blow just on the off chance that I’m not already dead.”
“Yes,” his friend replied softly. “It’s a lot harder to die when we know we have something to live for. Someone to live for.”
Harder, he called it, as if it was something that could be done at all. “So how do I do it?”
“Deacon...” Gideon leaned forward, and there was a sadness in his expression that Deacon had never seen before. “Maybe you don’t. There’s a difference, you know. Between being willing to die, and being ready to die. Facing their death on the wall seemed like a good way to make sure people understood the gravity of their oaths. But I never wanted you to be eager. To be ready. To spend yourselves as if your lives aren’t the most precious commodity this Sector has.”
There was a difference, maybe, but you couldn’t slide a knife between willing and eager, not in Sector One. Gideon’s grandfather had taught his people to sacrifice gladly, readily. Zealously. It was impossible for that attitude, an attitude that Gideon was still battling, not to rub off on other things.
“It’s easy to forget,” Deacon told him. “Especially when all you see is sacrifice being revered because of the shit the Prophet pounded into people’s heads. That old bastard’s been dead forever, and he’s still pulling their strings. Mine too, I guess.”
“And mine.” Gideon rubbed a hand over his face and sank back into the chair. “Isabela is officially sainting Ana’s father at the midsummer festival. Thirty years he served this sector, and the moments we’ll glorify are the last ones he drew breath. But what do I do, Deacon? Deny him that honor? That won’t change what they revere, it will just take away a reverence he earned a hundred times over.”
“Shit, no. It’s just...”
“Tell me.”
Deacon met his gaze. “Maybe wait until we are dead. You can’t tell me that I’m not meant to embrace my death when all of my memorials are already half-finished.”
Gideon made a choked sound caught somewhere between a laugh and a sigh. “I know. I know. I’ve avoided that mess for far too long, because honestly? It makes me uncomfortable. The commodification, the opportunism...” This time his sigh was weary. “I don’t know how to untangle it or where to start. It isn’t as if the Prophet kept his hands clean in that regard. Maybe it’s baked into our bedrock.”
“It doesn’t have to be. Some things have already changed. Just not these things.”
“You’re right. But Kora will murder me if I wear you out with debates over the ethical ramifications of dismantling capitalism.” Gideon lifted the book again with a smile. “Get some rest, Deacon. I’ll stay here, if you don’t mind. I’ll even read to myself, if you want.”
He was strangely exhausted, but the last thing he wanted was to slip back into the darkness, alone. “I don’t mind listening.”
“All right.” Gideon opened the book and skimmed a few pages before settling back, his voice falling into a warm, easy rhythm. “When he shall hear she died upon his words, the idea of her life shall sweetly creep into his study of imagination, and every lovely organ of her life shall come apparelled in more precious habit, more moving, delicate and full of life...”
Deacon listened for a while as he drifted, enjoying the cadence more than the words. “You know I hate this play, right?”
“You do?”
“Everyone thinks Benedick is such an asshole, but Claudio is the real dickhead.”
“Because Benedick knows he’s an asshole.” Gideon’s voice was wreathed with wry amusement. “Never trust a man who thinks he’s good and noble.”
“Truth.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Ana heard Zeke’s bitching while she was still twenty feet from the common room. “...makeshift, corner-cutting shortcuts. He should know better.” A pause. “But it’s brilliant. Totally fucking reckless and probably unstable as hell--like, I don’t even know how the fuck this algorithm works--but... Brilliant.”
“He doesn’t have access to all the stuff he would need to do it straight and proper,” Laurel protested. “Surely you remember what that was like. Goose makes it work.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Ana turned the corner and found Zeke seated at the table with Laurel leaning over his shoulder, watching as he poked at a tablet. “Maybe you should grab the brat up by the scruff of the neck and drag him out here so I can teach him to respect Dijkstra.”
Reyes looked up from his book. “Respect who?”
“Edsger Dijkstra. Some ancient computer--”
“Okay, never mind,” Reyes interrupted. “I’ve realized I don’t care.”
“Asshole.” Zeke looked up as Ana straddled one of the benches. “Hey, you finally get some sleep?”
“A little bit.” She hadn’t thought she’d be able to, but her body had given up somewhere around forty-two hours of being awake, and Ashwin had made it clear that she was going back to her room under her own power or over his shoulder, but she was putting her ass in bed one way or the other.
Seven hours of restless dreams about running through dark corridors while alarms wailed in warning hadn’t been particularly peaceful, but she supposed it counted as sleep.
Zeke took the words at face value as he flipped Laurel’s tablet back into its case. “I was looking at some of the custom software our mutual friend programmed for Laurel. She has some pretty sweet toys, I gotta admit.”
“A person needs more than weapons of opportunity to crawl the sectors, stamping out injustice.” Laurel ruined her solemn statement by winking at Ana.
“Watch it. We’ve got permanent dibs on the hero gig.” Reyes eyed her over the top of his book. “Maybe you should stick around. Help us out.”
Laurel laughed.
The first spark of something warm kindled in Ana’s chest. She liked Laurel’s laughter. She liked her sarcasm and her humor and the way she kicked through doors and demanded to be taken seriously.
She liked having another woman around.
“Let’s not be hasty, laughing this off.” Zeke stroked his chin and studied Laurel. “I mean you’re nuts, but that’s more of a feature than a bug. You’re a hell of a shot. How do you feel about impossible odds and certain peril?”
“That’s all that exists in Sector Three.” She glanced around, then stopped and wrinkled her nose. “You guys are serious.”
“Ignore them.” Ana leaned forward and folded her arms on the table, and it felt so good to lower her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. To joke. “Instead, think about how much fun we could have kicking their asses together. I don’t have nearly enough time to keep them humble all by myself.”
Laurel raised both eyebrows and made a soft noise, like she was considering the possibilities. Then she turned her attention to the corner where Gabe sat silently, an open book ignored in his lap. “What about you?”
Gabe had shadows in his eyes. He’d been cleared to leave the infirmary, but his exhaustion showed in the slowness of his smile. But it was a smile, one of Gabe’s rare, genuine ones--the kind he rarely offered to anyone outside the Riders. “I thought you liked saving my ass. Now you want to kick it?
”
She shrugged. “I’m a complicated woman.”
The front door swung open, and Ashwin stepped through. All eyes landed immediately on him, and he inclined his head in acknowledgment. “Deacon’s awake and doing all right. Kora’s run some tests and thinks she’ll be able to release him by tomorrow.”
Relief fluttered in Ana’s chest. But before she could voice it, Ashwin turned to her. “And Gideon wants to see you in his office. Now.”
Oh, shit.
»»» § «««
Facing Gideon was the hardest thing Ana had ever done.
No, she amended, planting her boots and lacing her fingers behind her. Facing the possibility of leaving Deacon behind would always be the hardest thing she’d ever done. But holding steady while her leader watched her with serious brown eyes was firmly in the top ten.
Then he gave her that look--the one that made believers out of skeptics. The one that made you feel stripped naked, your flaws and faults identified, weighed, and measured.
But not judged. Gideon rarely judged. He understood.
“All right,” he said finally. “I’ve heard Hunter’s version of events. Now I want yours.”
Ana swallowed hard. It was tempting to unleash her fraying temper, to empty herself of the exhaustion and nerves and stress and grief that had built as the aftermath of this battle--and what it could have cost--hit her.
But she was a soldier, one who’d been asked to report. So she did, picking each word with care, describing the situation and Deacon’s orders and her decisions. Gideon’s eyes narrowed as she continued, so she flattened her voice even more, trying to wipe emotion from her tone.
Then she reached the point where she’d had to make the call to leave, and no amount of clenching her hands behind her back could keep the soft tremble from her words. “I knew he’d want us to leave,” she said. “I ordered the noncombatants and the Riders out. But when we reached the top level, Zeke got a hit on Deacon’s location.”
“And?” Gideon prompted, when her pause went on for too long.
“And I made a choice.” Her voice steadied as she remembered that moment of clarity, and she met Gideon’s eyes squarely. “Returning for Deacon was an acceptable risk.”
