Chapter 23
I woke up because something was wrong.
Jasper's arm lay across my chest, his breathing deep against my back. The tunnels held that dead-hours quiet where even the generator hum dropped out and left nothing but stone and dark. My abuela used to say that the mountain breathed at night. Whatever this was, it came from outside the mountain.
I eased out from under his arm. The man ran on four hours of sleep like it was a lifestyle choice, and I was not about to ruin one of the nights he actually went under.
He twitched against the sheet where my body had been, fingers curling around empty space, and something in my chest pulled sideways.
My feet hit cold stone. The floor vibrated, a tremor that climbed through the soles and settled in my teeth. I froze.
The blast hit like thunder. The whole compound shook hard enough to knock dust from the ceiling, and the light bulb swung wildly, throwing shadows across the walls.
Jasper already had his hand on the katana before his eyes opened.
He found me in the dim light and went from dead asleep to full tactical between one breath and the next.
"Fuck," I said, grabbing my gun from under the pillow.
"Are we under attack?" He yanked his jeans on.
"Don't know, but that was definitely an explosion."
Alarms screamed from deeper in the tunnels. Jasper had his shirt on and was out the door before I finished lacing my boots. I gave up on the second one and ran after him, gun up, my heart slamming hard enough to crack a rib.
The corridor was pure chaos. People shoved past in three languages at once, dust filling the air thick enough to choke on. I grabbed a man rushing by and spun him around.
"?Qué pasó?"
"North entrance." His eyes were too wide. "They found us."
The Pantheon had found us. Zeus had found us. Mierda.
I shoved through the crowd toward the command center, fighting the current of bodies running in the other direction. Jasper moved ahead of me with his hand on the katana across his back, every step predatory. People cleared a path without knowing why.
Hades had the command center running before we arrived. He stood over the central table, pointing at maps and issuing orders while Vihaan hammered his keyboard and screens flashed security feeds. The man prayed before every meal and commanded a room like he'd been born behind a war table.
"North tunnel compromised," Hades said when he clocked us. "They breached the first set of blast doors. Second set is holding. Two separate charges. First was a diversion; second collapsed part of the eastern passage."
"How many?" Jasper asked.
"At least twenty on the feeds," Vihaan said, eyes locked on his screens. "Heavy tactical gear. Myrmidons."
"Casualties?"
"Unknown. Communications are down in that section."
My mother came through the door with a shotgun I recognized from my grandfather's collection. The stock had a crack in it from before I was born, and she held it like she'd grown up with it in her hands, which she had.
"We have men in position," she said. She looked at Hades, but she spoke to me. "The Kalderash are holding the secondary approach. Valentina mobilized everyone who could fight. The children are secure in the lower chambers with Beni and the elders."
The room went still. Hades looked at my mother, then at me. The resistance fighters had expected a lot of things from the Romani families sheltering in their tunnels. A coordinated defense with positions already manned was not one of them.
I followed her into the corridor, Jasper right behind me. Shots cracked and multiplied as we closed on the northern section, bouncing off stone until the sound lost its shape. We turned a corner, and I stopped.
The narrow passage had turned into a killing field.
Valentina crouched behind an overturned metal table, reloading a rifle like she could do it asleep.
Kalderash fighters had dug in around her, behind overturned carts and chunks of stone blasted loose from the walls.
My people. My grandmother's people. The same families who'd survived a hundred years of worse than this by knowing when to hide and when to fight.
Valentina nodded at me. The others turned too, and the weight of that landed in my stomach. They waited for the word and they looked at me to give it, because I'd won a knife fight on a mountain and my grandmother had handed me a seat. This was the job.
Alonzo worked through the defenders, checking positions, handing out ammunition. He'd been ready before I arrived.
I pulled him aside. "North approach. Widest corridor they have. Break their formation before it reaches us."
He nodded once and signaled to his fighters.
"Valentina. East tunnels. Tight corridors, bad lighting. Their gear works against them in there."
She bared her teeth in something closer to a dare than a smile.
"Fall back if they push too hard. We need you breathing more than we need dead Myrmidons."
She gave me one nod and moved out with her fighters behind her.
Jasper caught my eye before he moved deeper. He pressed two fingers to my chest, right over my sternum, and held them there for a single beat. Then he turned and disappeared into the dark with his katana drawn.
The spot on my sternum stayed warm. I wanted to press my hand over it and hold the heat in. Instead, I grabbed a rifle from the nearest fighter and checked the magazine. Full load. The stock sat cold against my shoulder, and I pressed it tighter because cold and solid was what I had right now.
My tío Emilio taught me to shoot when I was fourteen.
He'd set up tin cans behind the barn and stood behind me with his hand on my shoulder and told me the gun was just a tool, Diego, same as a hammer, same as a forge.
You respect it and it works for you. He'd been dead for days now, and here I stood in a tunnel with his lesson in my hands and his blood on somebody's ledger.
The fighting came fast.
A myrmidon came around the corner and I put two rounds in his chest before he raised his rifle.
He went down, and the next one stepped over him.
I fired, missed, and the stone next to my head exploded into chips that stung my cheek.
I ducked back. Down here the concussion hit worse than the noise, each exchange slamming my chest like a fist. My ears went thick after the first volley and everything after that came through cotton.
Every muzzle flash turned the world white.
I blinked at afterimages while the next man already closed the gap.
The rifle kicked hard against my shoulder, and the stone walls threw it all back.
The kid from the gully, the one who'd fired first, crouched three positions down and worked his rifle like he owed something.
Maybe he did. He reloaded cleanly and put a Myrmidon down when the man cleared the barricade.
I let him be. We needed every gun, and penance was his business.
Between volleys, I turned my head toward the deeper tunnels. The katana hadn't sung in too long. I tightened my grip on the rifle stock until the knuckles ached, the same ache I'd carried in my grandmother's kitchen doorway when I'd wanted to cross the room and put my hands on Jasper and couldn't.
Alonzo's voice crackled over the radio, calm as a man ordering coffee. "North corridor. We're funneling them into the overhangs. They're falling apart."
"East corridor holding," Valentina reported. "Two down on their side. We're good."
A section of the ceiling came down in the main corridor. Dust billowed out and choked me. Rock blocked the passage where the lead squad had pushed through. They were cut off, trapped between us and rubble, and Beni's people shredded them from three directions before they could regroup.
Below me, Valentina's fighters threaded through the drainage channels between positions. My abuela would have lost her mind if she'd known her grandniece crawled through a sewer with a rifle. Valentina would have told her to take it up with God.
A body hit the ground beside me. Mateo. Half his face was gone.
He'd brought me coffee yesterday, black, no sugar, and he'd said something about his daughter's birthday next week.
He'd sat in my grandmother's root cellar and gripped his knee while the Kris decided whether to join this fight, and he'd voted yes because Lenca voted yes and Mateo always followed courage when he found it.
I kept moving.
Jasper's katana sang from somewhere deeper in the tunnels.
That whistle of steel cutting air carried through stone the way gunfire couldn't, clean and singular.
I tracked him without seeing him, one part of my brain on the corridor in front of me and the rest on the man I loved working somewhere in the dark.
Every time the blade went silent, my stomach dropped.
Every time it sang again, I could breathe.
Valentina's voice came over the radio. "They're pulling back from the east."
"North approach secure," Alonzo reported.
The shooting in my section thinned and died. I had blood on my hands, stone dust in my throat, and my whole back had locked tight enough to snap.
The fight had moved deeper. The sound changed into something wilder, more personal. Steel on steel carried from the main corridors, and underneath it a voice that screamed without words.
Achilles was here.
I stepped over bodies from both sides, reloading as I went. I stopped looking at faces because every face belonged to someone I could not carry right now.
I turned the corner and everything stopped.
Bodies lay everywhere. Achilles stood in the middle of it with Patroklos's chain sickle in one hand and a Greek sword in the other. Both dripped red. He fought like he'd already decided to die.
He locked onto me with recognition first. Then rage.
"You." The word tore out of him. "You're the one. You killed him."