by Rachel Aaron
“We’re trying to get to the wall,” Jax reminded her.
“Not the wall where the inner gate is,” Rosalie said. “Our wall!”
She pointed across the roofs at the wide sweep of white that encircled the city. The arc Emmett had just drawn. The petal of Wall Rose that shielded Trost. “The outer wall! We can run along the top of it, all the way to the inner gate,” she said excitedly. “We won’t even need our maneuvering gear!”
“That’s a damn good idea,” Jax said.
“And we’re closer to the wall than we are to the inner gate,” Emmett said, drawing a line from their spot in the diagram to the encircling arc. “If we alternate canisters, we should have just enough gas!”
“We all should have retreated to the wall when the cannons fell,” Rosalie said, pressing her hands to her head. “Why didn’t I think of that earlier? I sent everyone into the city. I might have gotten them all killed!”
“Don’t count the Garrison out yet,” Jax said. “We’re a tough lot. You don’t last long on the wall if you’re not a survivor.”
“We’d better get going, then,” Emmett said. “If we talk here much longer, survival won’t be an option.”
He nodded down at the street. Rosalie turned to see that the crowd of titans following them had caught up. Some were tall enough to reach the roof, their fingers plowing up the tiles as they felt blindly for their prey.
Jax signaled silently for the squad to move down the eastern edge, but just as they were about to jump, Jax stopped short. When Rosalie looked at him questioningly, he held up the handles of his maneuver gear, squeezing the triggers to show the nothing that followed.
“Looks like that’s it for me,” he whispered. “No time to switch gas, so you two go ahead. I’ll stay and hold them off.”
“No,” Rosalie said, grabbing the spare canister off her belt.
“We are not leaving you,” Emmett echoed, unscrewing his canister as well. “Take what’s left of mine. I’ll switch to my spare and—”
The tiles beneath them exploded, flinging the three soldiers into the air as a titan’s giant hand burst through the roof they’d been standing on. Rosalie and Jax managed to land on their feet, but Emmett was thrown several meters away. He landed on his left leg, which made a sickening crack.
Emmett screamed in pain, a horrible sound that ripped out of him before he managed to clap a hand over his mouth. But it was too late. The sound of wounded prey drove the titans mad. They clawed at the building in a frenzy to reach the top.
“Sorry,” Emmett gasped as Rosalie ran to his side.
“It’s okay,” she said, fixing her eyes on his face to keep him from looking at his leg, which was bent entirely the wrong way. “Everything’s fine. We’ll just carry you.”
Jax was already stepping in to pick up Emmett, but the moment he shifted his body, Emmett screamed again.
“Sorry again,” he whispered, tears streaming down his face. “Willow always said big-bone breaks were the worst.”
“You’ll have to bear it,” Jax said. “If we don’t move now, we’re all going to get eaten.”
Something had changed on Emmett’s pained face. “Not all of us,” he said.
The calm in his voice made Rosalie’s blood run cold. “Emmett—”
“Let’s be…smart,” he said, panting with shallow breaths. “I’ll just slow you down, and I think I’m probably bleeding internally.” He closed his eyes as another wave of pain wracked his body. “Certainly feels like it, so—”
“No,” Jax growled through clenched teeth. “I see where you’re going, and the answer is no. We’re not leaving you.”
“You wanted us to leave you,” Emmett reminded him.
“That’s different,” Jax snapped. “I could defend myself. You can’t even move.”
“And we’re not leaving anyone,” Rosalie said firmly, glancing over her shoulder at the titan who’d broken through the roof. The ten-meter creature resembled a gargoyle, with a hunched torso and short, thick limbs. “Come on. We have to go.”
She reached to help Jax hoist their injured squadmate, but Emmett smacked their hands away. “I won’t be the reason you die,” he said desperately. His breathing was even shallower, and his eyes were losing their ability to focus, but his pale face was more determined than ever.
“Willow was my other half,” he said. “Without her, I’m just a fraction. Take my canister, get away.”
“No!” Rosalie cried, at last losing her composure as she fell to her knees. “I won’t lose you, too.” She reached to touch his face, feeling his terrifyingly cold, clammy skin before he shoved her hand away.
“Rosalie…go…”
“No!” she cried. “We’re not leaving anyone!”
“Rosalie!” Jax shouted, but it was too late. The titans had heard her voice, and they were coming, their smiling faces hungry and excited as they pulled themselves over the edge of the roof. Jax whirled and drew his swords to face six titans. Four were over ten meters tall.
Rosalie was about to jump up to join the fight when Emmett grabbed her wrist.
“Sorry,” he said, smiling sadly as he reached with his other hand to shove his spare canister into the clip on her blade sheath.
“Stop,” she ordered. “What are you—”
But Emmett had already slid his hand down her wrist to the handle of her maneuvering gear. He squeezed the trigger, firing Rosalie’s hooks into the roof of the building across the street. A second later she was yanked off her feet, hauled up by her wires as they reeled in.
It was only thanks to months of training that she landed on her feet. Yanking her hooks out as fast as she could, Rosalie spun around to leap back across the street. But just as she was about to fire, Emmett began waving his arms.
“Here!” he screamed, grabbing a sword from his holster and drawing it across his shoulder. “Over here, you bastards! Eat me!”
The wound was a deep one, and the titans all froze. The metallic reek of Emmett’s blood in the air called to them like a promise. They turned as one, pivoting from Jax to close in on Emmett, whose uniform was now bright red.
“What the hell are you doing?” Jax screamed.
Just before the monsters engulfed him, Emmett yanked his gas canister off his maneuvering gear and threw it. The metal cylinder bounced over the clay roof tiles, bumping to a stop against Jax’s boot. But Jax didn’t pick it up. He stood and stared in horror as the titans formed a circle around his squad member, their greedy hands reaching down.
“NO!” Rosalie screamed, firing her maneuvering gear. Now that the titans were grouped together, she had a clear spot to land, but it was miles too late. Emmett was already buried inside the circle of flesh-crazed monsters, the smell of blood so overpowering, it made her eyes water.
Rosalie equipped her swords and charged forward anyway, intending to hack through whatever the cost, but Jax grabbed her shoulder. She was sobbing and fighting him when the biggest of the titans, a fat, hairless eleven-meter nightmare with eyes bugging out of his head like a goldfish, raised his sausage-fingered hand to shove something bloody and broken into his mouth. The hunk of red meat didn’t even look human anymore, but Rosalie forced herself to watch.
“Rosalie!”
Jax’s voice sounded so far away, as if she was underwater. But his face was close, his blue eyes desperate. He hooked the gas canister Emmett had tossed him into place. The moment it clicked, he grabbed Rosalie and then they were in the air. Where to, Rosalie couldn’t see. The whole building was sliding sideways as even more titans climbed up following the scent of blood. Under all that weight, the supports couldn’t hold, and the two of them swung away just as the structure collapsed with an echoing boom. She was watching the titans wiggle out of the rubble when she felt someone gently shaking her.
“Come on, Rosalie,” Jax said. “Don’t you dare check out on me.”
Ch
ecking out sounded like a marvelous idea. They were on a roof across the street, hidden between chimney stacks. It was quiet and safe, and her body felt numb. Nothing hurt. Why should she leave? She was so tired. Why not just rest…
“No,” Jax said sharply, grabbing her shoulders when she started to slump. “Dammit, Rosalie. Don’t quit on me now. Don’t let the titans win!”
“But they did win,” she whispered. “I couldn’t save him.”
“It’s all right,” Jax whispered back.
“It’s not,” she said, pushing him away so she could curl herself into a ball. “I couldn’t save him or Willow. I couldn’t do any—”
“Stop,” Jax said angrily. “Before you say another word of that nonsense, look down at the street and tell me what you see.”
A confused Rosalie looked, but all she saw were titans. There were more of them than ever, big ones and small ones ambling side by side between the empty buildings, their vacant faces stupid and terrifying as they searched for new prey.
“I don’t understand,” she said, turning back. “It’s just titans.”
“Exactly,” Jax said, smiling. “There’s nothing in the streets but titans because you bought the people who lived here time to escape. You stopped Woermann from letting the breach fold, and then you came up with the plan that held it. You’re the reason Trost isn’t becoming another Shiganshina, and because of that, we might be able to take it back. But we can’t do anything until we rejoin the rest of the Garrison, and that means getting to the wall.”
He put his hands on either side of her head and gently turned it toward the white line sparkling like snow in the sunlight across the river, less than a kilometer away.
“Come on,” he said, putting his hand in hers. “Let’s get out of here so we can start fighting back.”
Rosalie squeezed his hand so tight, she heard something crack. Jax just grinned and squeezed back, reaching down with his other hand to replace her nearly empty canister with the spare from her blade sheath. When she was all hooked up, he said, “Ready?”
Rosalie nodded, letting go of Jax’s hand to wipe her eyes before grabbing her maneuvering gear handles. “Let’s go.”
* * *
The river made the rest of their flight easier. Where Rosalie and Jax could hop across the abandoned boats using their maneuvering gear, the titans pursuing them sank into the mud. This slowed them significantly, giving Jax and Rosalie a clear run to the wall and enough gas to get to the top.
After everything that had happened, being back in familiar surroundings felt unspeakably strange. Even the cannons were still in place, though useless now—they were all facing the wrong way, locked on the tracks with their barrels pointed beyond Wall Rose into Maria territory.
But they didn’t need cannons. There were no titans up here to get in their way. All they had left to do was jog along the curve of the wall until they reached the point where the arc that encircled Trost met up with the main circle of Wall Rose. It was a trip Rosalie had made a hundred times during patrols, but she’d never before been this tired. All she wanted was to lie down and rest, but she forced herself to keep moving, focusing on the back of Jax’s head to keep from falling off the wall.
As they ran, she caught glimpses of the devastation in her peripheral vision. Pillars of smoke and dust; wrecked, tumbled, burned, and smashed buildings; the unmistakable shambling forms that wandered the empty streets, pushing over houses and shouldering aside trees and bridges. There were sounds too. Barking dogs, the avalanche of collapsing walls, and the relentless thunder of hundreds of giant footsteps. Rosalie was trying to take comfort in the fact that she heard no screams when their goal finally came into view.
“There’s the gate,” Jax said, jogging to a stop. “And still standing!” He grinned across the rooftops at the giant wall of moveable brick—which looked exactly like their own Trost Gate, complete with the cameo of Saint Rose—before turning his smile on Rosalie. “Let’s catch our breath here a moment, just in case there’s a problem when we get to the—”
A large crash interrupted him. They both spun around, searching below for the source of the noise. “There!” Rosalie said, pointing toward the city center.
Nearly all the way back where they’d come from, in the streets near the Garrison HQ, a fresh plume of dust was rising from a building on the other side of the river. A building with a titan crashed into its side, almost as though it had been thrown into it.
“What the hell is that?” Jax said, lifting his hand to shield his eyes from the sun.
A few blocks away from the building, another titan was stalking down the road. Fifteen meters tall, it towered over the shops and warehouses. Even from this distance, Rosalie could clearly see it was a strange one. Its body had the normal proportions of a human being, with a more muscular physique than most of its kind. Its prominent jaw was square and wide, with flat teeth exposed on the sides as if it had no flesh on its cheeks. Steam curled from its mouth as though it was breathing smoke. But the strangest thing of all was the way it moved. It didn’t shamble or charge wildly like other titans. It walked with purpose, striding directly toward the titan who’d just pulled itself out of the collapsed building.
“It’s gotta be an aberrant like the Gobbler,” Jax muttered. “Strange physique, weird behavior—”
His voice dropped away as Rosalie gasped, and together they watched the strange creature pull back its boulder-sized fist, lining up its shot like a boxer before slamming into the other titan’s stupidly leering face.
“Did you see that?!” Rosalie cried, grabbing Jax’s arm as the other titan was sent flying, its head dangling from its shoulders. “The aberrant just attacked another titan!”
“I saw it,” Jax said, “but I don’t believe it. I’ve never see a titan go after one of its own like that. Never even heard of it.”
Rosalie scowled. “Why would he—”
She was cut off by a horrible sound. The aberrant was roaring. She’d never heard a titan make a sound before. They were always voiceless, even when you shot their legs off, even when they were giddily squeezing their victims into pulp.
Not this one. It screamed with a furious, haunting cry that echoed through the city. A sound of triumph, madness, death, battle. A sound Rosalie feared would shake loose all the emotions she’d been desperately keeping down for the last hour if they didn’t get away.
“Come on,” she said, grabbing Jax’s arm. “Let’s get out of here.”
He nodded and they started running again without another word. Behind them, Rosalie could still hear the echoes of the scream, along with more sounds of destruction that she guessed were the doings of the strange new monster. Another time and she would have watched, learned its weaknesses, but she’d seen too many monsters today. She could already feel her earlier numbness from the roof returning, but she couldn’t break down yet, so she focused on Jax and forced herself to keep going. One foot in front of the other until, at last, they reached the junction with Wall Rose.
Rosalie almost cried in relief when her feet crossed the line where the Trost Wall met the larger circle of Wall Rose. She was fighting not to flop down right there when Jax pulled her forward.
“We’re in luck,” he said excitedly, pointing at the top of the inner gate, the same gate Rosalie’s carriage had passed through in her mad rush to report to the Garrison, what felt like a lifetime ago. “Looks like most of the Garrison made it through.”
Just seeing the soldiers up there lifted the weight on Rosalie’s chest. But as she started to run forward, a rifle shot rang out clear and sharp in the afternoon air, and Jax went down like a stone.
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The gunshot was
still echoing when Jax hit the ground, leaving a streak of crimson on the white stone. Rosalie dropped to his side, turning his body over as he gasped in pain. The bullet had landed in his right thigh, and the wound was bleeding like a fountain. As she was ripping off her jacket to bind it, someone grabbed her from behind.
“No!” she screamed, kicking and fighting as a soldier lifted her into the air. “Let me go! He’s going to die!”
“Of course he’s going to die,” said a sneering voice. “That’s why we shot him.”
Rosalie’s head snapped up. While she’d been working to save Jax, a ten-squad of soldiers in Military Police uniforms had surrounded them. The biggest of the men was carrying a rifle, and behind him was Captain Woermann.
“Sir,” the officer holding the gun said with a cruel smile, “we got him.”
“Excellent,” Woermann replied, looking down at Jax with terrifying hate. “Sergeant Cunningham is a traitor. He attacked his fellow Garrison soldiers and threatened his superior officer.”
“That was me!” Rosalie said frantically, struggling against the soldier holding her fast while the pool of blood beneath Jax’s leg grew. “Punish me, not him!”
“I would,” Woermann said. “But as you were so quick to point out back at the gate, you’re noble. That means your fate lies in the hands of the king. This filth, though…”
His voice trailed off as he lifted his leg to place his boot on Jax’s heaving chest. Jax wheezed under the weight, but his glare was pure murder as he grabbed the captain’s foot. “I can still throw you off the wall before you kill me,” he said through clenched teeth.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Woermann replied, his eyes shining cruelly. “We’re not going to kill you here.” He leaned closer, putting more weight on Jax’s chest. “A quick death is too good for a traitor like you. In situations such as these, examples need to be made. As soon as the Trost situation stabilizes, we’re going to hang you in front of the entire Garrison.”
