Chapter Twenty-Eight #3
Evelyn lifts the smallest child, a boy of maybe six, and passes him up.
He is limp, drug-heavy, but his eyes flutter open when I take him under the arms. I lock him against my chest with one arm, gripping the rungs with the other.
“Hold on,” I command. “To me or the ladder. Your choice. But don’t let go.
” I climb. Fifteen feet…twenty… The rungs are slick with condensation, and God knows what else from years of neglect.
My boots scrape the wall behind me for some added stability.
The boy’s fingers dig into my neck, panic overriding sedation.
Below, I hear Kiera’s voice—calm and deadly.
“Evelyn, you pass them up. If you drop one, I'll shoot you. Dr. Reyes, you’re last. Move.” Thirty feet.
The air was thinning, growing hotter. My arms shake, but the memory of other climbs holds me steady: construction sites, fire escapes.
I was built for this…molded for vertical escapes.
I will not let them down. Forty feet… I pass the first child up to a ledge I find in the dark.
A maintenance platform, maybe. He collapses there, gasping.
“Next,” I call down, my voice echoing in the shaft.
One by one. The older girl is light as a bird, climbing better than expected, her fingers finding holds I can’t even see.
A heavier boy, twelve or thirteen, I have to drag most of the way, his feet scrambling against my legs.
After the eighth kid, I start climbing again to make room for the others on the platform.
Seventy feet…ninety... The smoke reaches us, a grey curtain rising from below.
I hear coughing—Kiera, harsh and angry. Reyes, weaker.
“Faster,” I growl, hauling up the tenth child.
Two hundred feet… My arms are lead, my shoulders burning.
I’ve lost feeling in three of the fingers on my left hand.
But the rungs keep coming, and I keep climbing, wedging myself between the walls when I need to rest, passing the kids to the ledges as we find them.
At two hundred fifty feet, I find the exit hatch.
A metal grate, bolted from the outside. I don’t have a tool.
I brace my back against the wall, shielding the children with my body the best I can, and draw my pistol with my free hand.
Three shots crack through the shaft—deafening in the enclosed space.
The bolt shatters. I ram my shoulder into the grate, bursting it wide open.
Cold mountain air slams into my face, sharp enough to cut.
Trees. Open sky. Stars. I haul myself and the babies strapped to my chest out, then one by one, the children behind me.
I lie on pine needles, chest heaving, and reach back into the hole.
“Kiera,” I shout, voice raw and rough. “Now!”
Her hand bursts from the smoke-wreathed dark, reaching for mine, fingers slick with blood.
I seize her wrist and gently haul her up as the first of the mercenaries’ spotlights sweeps the ridgeline fifty yards away.
“We’re out,” Kiera gasps against my neck.
But I was already scanning the shadows, counting heads, my free hand never leaving my weapon. Seventeen. We needed seventeen.
Evelyn claws her way out next, dragging a limp Dr. Reyes by the collar while two tiny babies are strapped awkwardly to her chest with torn fabric.
Behind her comes the last of the older children—one of the twins—her face grey with ash, eyes unnervingly clear in the moonlight.
I count again. Sixteen. “Where’s the last one?
” I snarl, already lunging back toward the hatch, smoke still pouring out like the mountain itself is exhaling death.
Kiera catches my arm. “Sterling, stop.” But I already see him.
The last boy—younger than the rest—frozen four feet down the shaft, paralyzed by height or the smoke.
His fingers slip on the rusted rungs. I dive back into the hole.
My arms are jelly, burning from the climb, but I reach him just as he falls.
I catch his wrist. His full weight yanks hard, nearly ripping my shoulder from the socket.
I hang there. One hand locked on a crumbling rung, the other gripping the boy over a three-hundred-foot drop.
Smoke curls up around us like hungry fingers. His terrified eyes lock on mine.
“Climb,” I growl at the boy. “Or we both die.” He scrambles up me like I’m the rungs, small hands clawing my shoulders, knees digging into my ribs.
The second Kiera hauls him out, I drag myself over the lip of the hatch and collapse onto the forest floor.
Boots thunder closer. Mercenaries cutting through the trees.
I scan the brush. Seventeen small shapes crouched low, trembling but alive.
Free. Then my eyes find Kiera. Soot and blood streak her face.
One hand rests unconsciously over her belly like she’s shielding something she hasn’t said out loud yet.
“We need to go,” I whisper, my voice rough.
“Into the trees. Now.” We melt into the dark like ghosts, seventeen stolen lives, and the women carrying our future vanishing with us.