CHAPTER 36
The neighborhood was laid out as a series of nested U-shaped streets.
Five-story, cookie-cutter apartment buildings identical to Roza’s lined both sides of each street.
The open ends of each U connected to a straight street lined with row houses, the backs of which paralleled the airport service road.
Once they cut through the row houses to the service road, the terrain was wide open. No trees, bushes, or other barriers provided concealment. They would have to cross one-hundred fifty feet of open road. Then they would encounter a six-foot high airport perimeter fence with no gates or breaks.
Brenna and Grace would have to stop in the open long enough to climb the fence and hand the children over one at a time.
They may as well paint bull’s-eyes on their jackets.
“All set?” Grace appeared in the doorway. Mr. Fierce was snarling and squirming under her arm while Grub, peeking out of the sling, screwed up her face in annoyance at his flailing limbs.
Brenna held out the backpack. “Can you take this?”
“Hold Fierce a sec—” she said, trading the child for the pack.
Mr. Fierce yowled vociferously.
Great, Brenna thought. A bullhorn to go with the bull’s-eyes.
Given the awkward weight of the children in the sling and the hardscrabble surface, Brenna opted to go down the apartment building stairs on her bottom. Using her boots as brakes, she was able to keep one arm around the precious bundle and use her free arm for balance.
Although Mr. Fierce was tightly bundled, he was twisting his torso vigorously enough that Grace decided to follow Brenna’s lead and go down on her butt, too. She placed Mr. Fierce on her lap, gathered Grub into her elbow and slid roughly to the ground.
The street—which Brenna reckoned was the next-to-outermost ring of the nested U’s—appeared to be quiet.
She peeked around the corner. Just the usual death and destruction.
She scrutinized the deserted landscape, right, left, up, down, not wanting to miss anything that could get them killed.
Land mines. Snipers. Nationalist troops.
She tugged Grace alongside herself so she could see where they were going.
She motioned forward and to the right. “The airport terminal’s that way. We’ll cut across the streets and through the apartment buildings as much as we can, always moving in that direction. Once we get to the service road we’ll see what we can do.”
“Okay.”
Brenna leaned past her, checking the street one last time. “Let’s go.” She ran out, cradling the small heads in the sling, cushioning them from her jarring stride as much as she could.
Grace dashed across the road alongside her. Mr. Fierce loved to go fast, making not a peep as they snaked between piles of debris, always staying on the concrete, and dashed into the shade of the next apartment building.
“To the back and stop?” Grace, fast learner that she was, already had her back against the wall, providing the narrowest possible profile to twitchy-fingered snipers.
“Uh-huh.”
They repeated the pattern twice more, running to the next street and the next without incident. By now, she estimated, they were dead-center in the neighborhood, at the peak of the next-to-innermost U. Though she heard the occasional pop-pop of gunfire, there was still no shelling.
That concerned Brenna, crazy as it was.
She peeked out to the next street. There was probably one more nested street before they should start moving through the apartment buildings down the leg of the U to the service road. She leaned forward, scanning, scanning. She glimpsed a fleeting shadow and jerked back.
“What?” Grace whispered.
“I’m not sure.” It was just a shadow—wasn’t it? It was only a glimpse, a flash. Maybe nothing. She wasn’t certain. She took a deep breath and eased forward again, cautioning herself not to be impatient.
Beside her, Mr. Fierce fidgeted, lacking the stimulus of motion. Grace swung him in an arc to quiet him.
Squeak mewled, crowded by the larger boys.
Brenna studied the street, concentrating, individually analyzing each feature of the landscape—every window, every doorway, every flutter of garbage.
When the Nationalists came, would they send troops across the neighborhood in a straight line from the west, or rumble up the streets, following their curve?
“Okay,” she finally said. “One…”
Grace tensed beside her, repositioning Mr. Fierce in her arms.
“Two…”
Brenna stepped out. She didn’t know what caught her attention—a noise, a blur, a winged messenger telling her to get the fuck back, but she braked. Hard. And spun back.
Grace plowed into her, not expecting her sudden about-face.
“Back!” she hissed, tromping her feet. “Get back!” She grabbed her sleeve and hauled her, not gently, into the shadows of the shambled apartment.
“What?” she asked. “What did you see?”
“Tanks.”
“You’re sure? Tanks?”
She nodded. Shadows weren’t slate-blue.
Her face blanched.
“I think they’re on the service road. Quarter of a mile? I just glimpsed them between two buildings. They must have broken through the Separatists.”
“Headed east?”
She nodded, nausea rolling through her. “There’s Nationalist infantry between us and the airport.”
Grace groaned.
Brenna rubbed her fingers across her mouth, thinking. The Nationalists would sweep the neighborhood, house by house, room by room. “Let’s get upstairs,” she said. When the troops arrived, she wanted to hear them in advance.
Grace raced up the staircase behind her, following her through a series of broken walls that connected the third floor apartments.
She selected the center unit, which was painted throughout in a lugubriously-dark green. The opening where the front window belonged was as distorted as a dental patient’s mouth, but part of the wall had withstood the mortar and offered better cover.
Quickly ducking into the bathroom, kitchen, and two bedrooms—the apartment was laid out like Roza’s—Brenna verified that they were alone.
Grace followed her to the rear left bedroom.
She started clearing the floor with the side of her boot. This was as sheltered a spot for the babies as she would find.
“Now what?” Grace asked.
Well, Brenna thought, that depends.
Close quarters battle was the purview of elite soldiers.
A highly-trained squad entered a room rapidly, broke alternately right and left, and kept their backs to the walls while they assessed the main area of threat.
They exercised muzzle discipline, front and side focus, trigger control, and most importantly—target discrimination, to distinguish between enemies and hapless civilians.
Here in Kav?ak, she supposed, some adrenaline-crazed boob would pull the pin off a grenade and toss it inside.
“Bren?” Grace’s voice broke through her reverie.
“We wait,” she said. “If we make it to dark, we’ll try to cross the service road to the airport.”
Squeak cried out, her patience for elbows in the face exhausted. Brenna reached into the sling for the first of the boys, whose weight had shifted and was pressing the baby.
“We wait?” Grace turned her face aside, coughing. “Shouldn’t we be running?”
“Running?” She set Heckle—or was it Jeckle?—on the floor next to the wall. “Where to?”
She understood Grace’s desire to escape.
It was visceral, akin to the mindless bounding of wildlife trapped by a forest fire.
But they had a mountain jutting to the north, tanks on the service road between them and the airport, Nationalist infantry sweeping in from the west, and Separatist-held trenches to the east drawing rocket fire.
“What if we moved east through the apartments? Couldn’t we outrun the Nationalists?”
Brenna lifted the second boy out of the sling. “Going east takes us away from the airport. The further from the terminal we try to cross the service road, the more open space we have to traverse at the runway.”
“Is there cover near the terminal?”
She shook her head. “It’s just shorter.”
“How about Luc? Could his guys help us?”
Grace was picking through scenarios like a poker player with a lousy hand.
“Luc has no jurisdiction outside the airport compound. If we make it to the perimeter fence and get fired on while we’re climbing it, Luc’s troops will stand there and watch us get picked off.”
She straightened and looked her in the eye.
“Grace,” she said, her voice soft with regret. “There won’t be a cavalry.”
Grace slumped, stunned by Brenna’s bald pronouncement. The dynamics were so different now that they had the children.
Also, she realized, she’d missed a big ‘if.’
IF we make it ’til dark.
Moving with the exaggerated care of a drunk trying to coordinate a simple action, Grace set Mr. Fierce on the floor beside Heckle.
The tot’s thrashing had loosened the sheet enveloping him, but he was so tired his relative freedom meant nothing.
He lay there, dark eyes silently pinging from wall to ceiling to floor—waiting, like Grace, for whatever happened next.
Brenna freed Squeak and sat down with her.
Leaning against the wall with the infant nestled on her upraised thighs, Brenna wrapped her hands around the tiny fists and rested them atop her chest.
She didn’t say anything—she didn’t even look Grace’s way—but she could tell that Grace’s interpersonal radar was set on high.
Grub grunted crossly. Mr. Fierce had heaved himself against her the whole trip and she was put out. Grace pulled her out of the sling and settled on the floor with her, back against the wall. The baby curled herself into her chest, snuffling at the front of her shirt.
Patting Grub’s back, Grace pressed her lips against her scruffy head, concentrating on the ineffable comfort of holding her. These babies were likely the closest she’d ever get to parenthood.
Regret slid into her like a sharp blade. The Alcott family would end with her. She had no partner. She was childless, and too old to adopt a baby as a single parent. And now, because of her quest to avenge Aya, she might not even get home again to support her parents in their old age.
Obsessed with settling a score for a dead woman, she had betrayed the living.
Her stomach spiraled like a shot-down plane, trailing a plume of nausea and cold sweat. In the end, wasn’t that what mattered—love? Not stock portfolios, prestigious jobs, or social standing. Love. The sum of a life’s value. She tipped her head back, and closed her eyes. I love you guys. I’m sorry.
Grub’s head slid heavily to one side. She drifted into sleep with a soft sigh.
Grace slid her gaze over to Brenna. She was abrupt.
She cursed. She was disinclined to tact, only rarely mannerly.
Sometimes there was a chasm between law and morality, and she wasn’t a woman to wait for due process.
Her actions were humanitarian but technically they made her an outlaw and a smuggler.
Not exactly role-model material. But looking at Brenna now, she saw a woman who was also bone-meltingly tender—she’d practically sublimed Squeak into her heart.
Mariana was right. Behind that brusque exterior was a woman with a heart of gold, guided by a singular code of honor.
Brenna cut through bullshit and made Grace think about what mattered.
She jangled and stirred Grace in ways that Aya never had.
Aya had been safe, above reproach. Always under control, voice modulated, and graciously poised, Aya had been a woman who reflected well on a mate.
Grace’s eyes roamed down the slope of Brenna’s breasts.
Some relationships belonged to a given time and place, and did not transplant well to a different world.
After such a short time with her, Grace couldn’t be sure if theirs was one of them.
If they survived Kav?ak, how would Brenna look in the light of stateside life?
Grace was not given to impulse, or inclined to make declarations she might regret upon further consideration.
Still, in that incautious part of her heart, Grace knew she was falling in love with Brenna Rease.