Chapter 68.
After Jack and Wyatt both stumble through the debris they see Conner Lynch underneath the plate—half covered, half crushed, his body angled like he tried to become a shield.
Hannah is alive beneath him. Her red hair is spread across the floor.
She’s trying to wriggle out, but she won’t yank herself free because she’s staring at Conner’s face, waiting for it to move.
Conner, who had graduated with honors at West Point and been a football star, and then a rising star in Congress who people thought might be president someday.
His neck was wrong.
No part of him moving.
“Let us help you,” Jack says.
“Help him,” Hannah says, and her voice is small in a way that scares Alek more than screaming would. “He’s not breathing.”
It takes both Jack and Wyatt to slowly and painstakingly lift the heavy steel plate.
“Slowly,” Jack says to her. “His neck.”
When Hannah crawls free, she doesn’t stand. She stays on her knees beside Conner and presses two fingers to his throat like she’s been taught first aid and knows exactly what she’s not going to find.
Jack checks anyway. Pulse. Nothing. Breath. Nothing.
Jack gets close to his face, hoping for any sign—heat, movement, a flutter.
Hannah’s right.
He’s not breathing.
The way Elena wasn’t in the water.
“He can’t be dead,” Hannah whispers. “He can’t be—”
Softly Jack says his name. No response.
Alek kneels beside Hannah and tries to pull her up. Hannah doesn’t move. Then her arms go around Alek with sudden force, her body shaking, grief finally allowed out.
“He died for me,” Hannah says into Alek’s shoulder.
They can’t hear her sobs any longer, just see her back rising and falling as Alek rocks her gently back and forth, back and forth.
It’s Jack who breaks the terrible silence now that the bombs have stopped falling.
“Selfless service,” he says, almost talking to himself. “So that others may live.”