Chapter 15 #2
Forty people or one child. My family or a nine-year-old girl who'd learned to kill before she learned to read, who'd sat beside me at the window watching the dark and mapped escape routes in crayon and stabbed a Pantheon Judge in the leg.
She had never once asked me for anything except to let her do her job.
I couldn't let her go. I couldn't watch her walk away with that monster and do nothing.
But I couldn't sacrifice forty people either. The math broke every way I ran it.
I crawled forward through the dirt until I was in front of her at eye level. My hands shook so hard I had to press them against my thighs to make them stop.
"I'm coming for you," I said. The words held steady even though nothing else did. "You stay alive until I do. You understand me?"
She looked at me with those eyes that were too old for her face and nodded once, the same way Jasper did.
Then she turned and walked back to Patroklos. He just turned and started walking, and she followed him, as though she'd weighed her options and picked the one that kept everyone else breathing.
I stayed in the dirt as she left.
Patroklos's men fell back in formation, rifles still up, covering the withdrawal. They moved like professionals who'd done this a thousand times. Eight walked in the middle of them, small and straight, and she kept her eyes forward.
I wanted her to look back. I needed her to look back so her face would stay with me, so I could make sure she knew I meant what I said. But she kept walking, and then they were over the ridge and gone.
The sun came up. Orange light spilled over the mountains and turned the blood on the rocks black.
I pushed myself to my feet. Both legs screamed, and I ignored them. I had bodies to count, people to check on, and a choice I was going to carry for the rest of my life.
I found three dead as I moved through the gully.
One of Valentina's nephews, the one who'd been good with engines, lay against a boulder with his rifle still in his hands.
A woman from the southern valley whose name I couldn't remember but whose face I'd known my whole life lay near the tunnel entrance. And my grandmother.
Amparo Lucenio lay behind a boulder with a bullet through her chest. Someone had closed her eyes already. She had her hands folded across her stomach and looked smaller than she had in life, like death had taken something essential and left just the shell behind.
I knelt beside her and put my hand over hers. The cold ran straight through my palm.
"Lo siento, Abuela," I said. The words cracked. "I'm sorry."
She didn't answer. She was past answering, past judging me for the choices I'd made and the people I'd failed to protect.
She'd known every route through these mountains, every contact from Cádiz to Marseille, every arrangement that kept the kumpaniya connected to the wider network. Fifty years of maps that lived nowhere but in her memory, all bled out into the dirt with her.
I stood and kept moving because staying meant breaking down, and I couldn't afford that yet.
The kid who'd fired first sat against a rock with his head in his hands.
He couldn't have been older than nineteen.
He looked up as I passed, face white and sick with it, and I wanted to grab him by the throat and slam him into the ground.
He'd panicked. He'd fired into a standoff I was trying to hold together, and three people were dead because he couldn't keep his finger off a trigger.
I kept walking. If I stopped, I was going to break him, and I'd already broken enough things today.
I found my mother kneeling beside Abuela's body. She had her hand on my grandmother's face, stroking her cheek with her thumb the way she used to do when I was small and couldn't sleep. She shook but kept silent, kneeling there with her mother, trying not to fall apart.
"Mamá."
She didn't look up. She kept her hand on Abuela's cheek and pressed her other hand against her mouth. Then a sound came out of her that I'd never known from her before, something that tore loose from deep in her chest. It went straight through my ribs.
I dropped and wrapped my arms around her, and she cried into my shoulder, gripping my shirt tight enough that the fabric gave.
"I know," I said. I couldn't manage anything else. "I know."
She held on and shook, and I held on back because what the hell else was I supposed to do.
Eventually she pulled away and wiped her face with both hands. She tried to put herself back together, even though the cracks showed through.
"The wounded need..."
"Beni's handling it. You stay here with her."
"Diego..."
"Stay." I squeezed her shoulder. "Please."
She looked at me and something in her face crumpled again, but she nodded.
I pushed to my feet. Beni moved through the wounded with a couple of the others. I counted heads as I walked. Three dead, eight of them hurt badly enough to need attention, and the rest stood or sat, shell-shocked but mobile.
All of them looked at me.
Valentina sat with her back against a boulder, face like stone. One of the kids cried on someone's shoulder. Beni had a bloodstain spreading across his shirt that he ignored.
I stopped in the middle of the gully and forty pairs of eyes tracked me like I had answers.
Was it worth it?
Mierda. I didn't know. I'd made a choice. It was done. I had to live with it.
"We bury our dead," I said. "Then we get moving. We're not safe here."
"And the girl?" Valentina asked.
"I'm getting her back."
"How?"
I looked at her, at all of them, at the bodies in the dirt, the blood drying black on the rocks, the mountains beyond where Jasper still fought.
"I don't know yet," I said. "But I made her a promise."
Nobody argued. I'd already decided, and that was that.
Beni started organizing people to move the bodies. My mother stayed with Abuela. The sun kept climbing and turning everything orange and gold, like the world gave a shit that we'd just lost people.
I needed to get everyone moving. The rendezvous point was hours away through the mountains. Jasper was supposed to meet us there if he made it out, if he was still alive.
Last night he'd said he’d stay. I'd said after this, after tomorrow, whatever happens, and he'd looked at me like I'd offered him something he'd stopped believing existed. Now I had to stand in front of that man and tell him Eight was in Patroklos's hands because I'd made a call.
I turned away from the tunnel entrance and started down the gully.