THIRTY-THREE #2
Dakota doesn’t even look at him, her focus already trained firmly past the glass, locked in on the room beyond it with the kind of concentration that makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.
She’s not scanning the room like someone looking for family.
She’s searching like someone looking for a threat, and I understand that more than I’d like to.
Because there is no safe way to want someone back from the dead, right?
Not really. Hope is too sharp when it’s covered in razors.
It doesn’t feel like light and warmth. It feels very much like standing barefoot on broken glass and hot coals and deciding to walk across it anyway because the door might just be on the other side of it.
The room beyond the window is just pure chaos pretending to be procedure, a single curtain splitting the room in two.
Medics in white armbands are moving between bodies with fast, clipped urgency on one side.
A woman is sitting on a bench with blood running from her temple to her collar, a medic wrapping a fresh bandage around her arm.
An older man is bent forward with both hands braced on his knees while a different medic checks his eyes with a penlight.
And another survivor is on the other side of the curtain, medics coming and going with serious painted faces and an urgency about them I can feel on the other side of the glass.
Guards are keeping watch, sticking to the walls with their rifles lowered but ready.
A gurney lies crooked near the center of the room, one wheel turned at an awkward angle, as if it was just shoved there too quickly before it was forgotten.
Someone has dropped a pack on the floor, and its contents are spread across the tile.
Field ropes.
A cracked canteen.
A bloodied map.
Three small metal cases with NOVAC hazard marks stamped across the sides.
The sight of them makes Mercer grow eerily still, but not because he’s surprised. Because he’s afraid he’s not surprised at all.
Hale steps closer behind us, radio still in hand. “Report.”
One of the guards inside turns toward the speaker mounted next to the door. His face is pale under a streak of dirt, eyes flicking between Hale and whatever is happening just past our limited view.
“Four came through the wet gate,” he says, voice distorted slightly through the crackly speaker. “Two walking wounded. One critical. And one combative.”
I already know which three are the first, but the last makes me frown.
Dakota’s fingers twitch, just once, but Mercer sees it and so do I.
“Combative how?” Valeria pushes.
The guard glances back over his shoulder just as a crash sounds from somewhere inside the room, quickly followed by a medic snapping, “Hold him still before he tears something open again.”
The guard winces. “Half-conscious and still tried to take Ellis apart when they touched his bag.”
Ewan breathes out very softly. “Well, now, doesn’t that sound familiar?”
Dakota doesn’t blink, though. She’s gone so still that it feels like the entire hallway is forced to rearrange itself around her lack of movement.
Mercer leans toward the speaker and asks, “M-7?”
The guard nods once. “Looks like the tags match M-7.”
The words drop at our feet and stay there.
M-7.
Not just a file anymore. Not just a line typed onto paper. Not only a nasty little collection of letters and numbers tucked inside a folder.
A unit.
A team.
Blood on tile. Bodies behind glass. Survivors dragged back from wherever hell tore the last twelve days out of them.
I watch as Dakota absorbs that.
There’s no gasp. No trembling lip. No dramatic collapse into grief.
Nothing easy enough for comfort. Her shoulders only draw in slightly, the brim of her hat hiding her eyes from the side.
The movement is so small it might mean nothing at all to anyone else.
To me, it looks like her body is trying to fold around something too big to fit under her ribs.
Hale’s jaw tightens. “Names.”
The guard hesitates, and that hesitation is an answer in and of itself.
I instantly hate him for giving it, because Dakota’s scent changes in the space between one heartbeat and the next.
Wild honey and rain, locked down so hard that it turns almost metallic at the edges.
Fear crushed into discipline. Hope strangled before it can even make a sound.
Checking the clipboard in his hand, the guard eventually says, “Cody Porter. Nico Kinney. Azalea Castro.”
Then he stops.
Dakota presses one hand to the glass, but not softly. Not like she’s reaching for someone. But more like she’s holding herself from forcing herself through it.
“And?” Hale demands.
Before the guard can answer, the room behind him explodes into even worse chaos.
A metal tray clatters onto the floor with a jarring violence.
Someone curses and a medic stumbles backward into view, one hand lifted in a warning or surrender.
Another guard lunges at something just outside the narrow angle of the window and misses.
Dakota’s hand drops from the glass, and the hallway seems to tighten around us.
Inside the room, a voice snaps something too rough and broken for the speaker to catch properly, the words coming out in a crackle of noise I can’t decipher. It’s definitely male, though, and hoarse with pain. Furious enough to sound almost steady.
Mercer’s face drains of all color.
Not just a little, but all at once. Every single drop of color is gone so quickly that it looks as if someone has cut a string inside him. And Dakota sees it. Of course she does.
“What?” she asks.
Mercer doesn’t answer, and that’s definitely a shitty choice on his part.
Dakota’s head turns slowly and she repeats, “What?”
Inside the room, the crowd shifts. For one brief, imperfect second, I see a bloodied sleeve. A shoulder under torn fabric. A hand gripping tightly to the edge of a metal table hard enough that the knuckles grow white. Pale hair bowed forward, matted with blood and rainwater.
Then the medics close in again, blocking the view.
Not enough for recognition, but enough for punishment.
Dakota’s fingers curl close to her thigh, close enough to her knife I know she’s still hiding. Fletcher shifts half a step closer to her left, but not to stop her. More like he’s moved so he can be there when she moves.
Xeon’s expression empties in that creepily calm way of his. Ewan’s humor disappears from the room like a candle that’s been freshly pinched between wet fingers. Valeria’s hand tightens around her radio, and Hale looks at all of us like it’s finally dawned on him that this is no longer a situation.
It’s a fucking fuse.
The voice inside the room rises again, and this time I manage to catch the words.
“Don’t touch the bag.”
The words come out haggard and ragged, scraped raw by either pain or exhaustion or maybe even both.
Mercer closes his eyes for half a second then, and when he reopens them, he looks at least five years older.
Hale turns on him. “Doctor?”
Mercer swallows once, then says, “That’s him.”
The words are quiet. They don’t even need volume to ruin the entire mood of the hallway.
Dakota’s body goes utterly, terrifyingly calm. There’s no scent spike this time. No verbal threat. No smart-ass remark loaded and ready. Just a pure, undeterred calm.
I’ve seen that calm before, always in the seconds just before she launches a knife with a mean throw.
Hale reaches for the keypad next to the door. “No one goes in until he’s sedated.”
Dakota turns her head slowly then. So slowly. Scarily slowly.
I’ve actually watched Biters with more survival instincts in their rotting bodies than Hale shows in that very moment, and I can’t tell if he’s stupid, brave, or that confident. Either way, he makes a mistake.
“If you put him under before I see his face,” she says, voice so steady and level that it scrapes, “I’ll open every single locked door in this wing and let the consequences pick a side.”
Valeria swears under her breath.
Mercer says, “Commander.”
“No,” Hale snaps. “If that is Maine O’Reilly, then he’s injured, unstable, and carrying recovered NOVAC components from a compromised field route. No one touches him until we know exactly what he came back with.”
That’s the first time Hale says his full name.
Maine O’Reilly.
Not M-7.
Not field team.
Not classified personnel.
Maine.