CHAPTER 42
Feet pounding on the broken pavement, Brenna crossed the service road and shot into the nearest row house.
She stopped, chest heaving, and pressed against the wall, peering sideways out the window.
On the tarmac, the engines of the Herc accelerated.
The lumbering machine gathered speed down the runway and roared into the pink clouds. She watched until it became a speck.
Godspeed, my love.
She turned away from the window, dabbing impatiently at her eyes, trying to think.
Down the narrow hallway, a ragged square of daylight marked what had once been a doorway.
Beyond it lay the U streets, the warren of identical apartment buildings, and four small children huddled together on a cold floor.
Surely Mari? would be gone by now. He had a neighborhood to clear, territory to annex.
His troops hadn’t been sent out to babysit.
He would have moved on. Abandoned them, not shot them.
Surely.
She pushed off the wall. In her mental fog last night, in the darkness with Grace across her shoulders, she had become disoriented.
She didn’t know how many streets away the children were.
She didn’t know how she’d carry out four of them alone.
She just knew that if she scoured the streets systematically, eventually she would find the building with Dragoslav’s naked body lying on the garbage heap out front.
She sprinted down the corridor, picking up speed. With the Herc now clear of the airport, the artillery barrage would soon resume. This lull was her chance to cover ground, fast.
She leapt out into the daylight, feet hitting the road at full speed.
Snipe this, she thought. And she ran. Breathless.
Heedless. Boots thudding against the torn asphalt, crunching over jagged shards of shattered concrete, her feet slipping and skating as she flashed past bombed-out ruins, one street after another.
Squeak! Squeak with the dark eyes that gazed into hers and trusted her. I’m coming!
She turned a corner, and screeched to a halt. There he was— Dragoslav, on the garbage heap, his dead white skin reflecting sunlight. Her mind focused solely on finding the babies, she raced blindly forward, leaping between berms of debris, eating up ground.
But her foot came down on a long loose plank. It skidded.
And she heard the Click.
The unmistakable sound of a land mine being triggered.
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