Chapter 68
GEDEON
One street.
Just one more street and I would emerge in front of the Spire. And then, I would see them both. At least that was what I kept telling myself.
Only the emotion-deterring armor I had enshrouded myself in had prevented me from losing it when Kali and I had been separated immediately after we had breached the gates.
And having not a hunch whether Zion was okay… I had to will my teeth to stop grinding.
Relaxing my jaw, I peeked out from the street corner to survey the havoc.
Except my expectations turned out to be unfulfilled. Tranquility roamed the long stretch leading to the Spire, the sidewalks lined with pine trees, not a needle out of place.
In the depths of the city, soldiers didn’t run loose. Deceased didn’t adorn the roads. Howls of pain and bangs of bullets didn’t disturb the hush.
Only the closed doors betrayed the fact that citizens lived here, that they had locked themselves inside.
The city provided green-banded with anything they wished for, their lives so cushioned that a mere understanding we had invaded Ilasall had been sufficient to drive all able-to-reproduce folks into their houses.
Or almost all.
“No!” an auburn-haired woman screamed as her green-banded partner dragged her down the path to an apartment building. Based on the large size of the windows, a fresh coat of cream paint, and the thick open door, it appeared to be a dwelling for the rich, the saviors of the human race.
Or rather, the rabbits increasing our population numbers.
“Shut the fuck up,” the square-faced man sneered. Yanking her arm, he knocked her off balance, and then did it all over again, disregarding her cries and stumbles, rushing to reach the reinforced door that would take too long to break.
My blood ran hot.
Purple and blue blotches marred the woman’s neck—precisely how Eislyn’s throat had looked when Zion had smuggled her out of Ilasall.
Cursing myself for the detour, I dashed toward the couple. Tiny rocks sliced the rubber soles of my boots as I ran across the street—
The dressed-in-loose-white-pants-and-a-matching-shirt man spotted me. His mouth dropped open, revealing the red flesh inside.
“What…” he trailed off, ruffled by the sight of a bloody soldier racing toward him. He wasn’t sure whether I was a good guy.
Despite wearing the uniform, I was far from the puppets Ilasall’s Head of Military called his soldiers.
Before the short man could say another word, a recoil tested my muscles. My forefinger slipped off the trigger right as a circular hole appeared above his nose. He sagged on the ground, his corpse cracking its head on the concrete path.
A gust of wind tousled my hair, chilling the moisture soaking the back of my skintight shirt. The current of air whipped around the gaping woman, ruffling her ankle-length dress and molding around her rounded stomach.
She was pregnant.
Scanning the street for anyone who might have heard the shot, I ordered, “Get inside and lock the doors. Do not let anyone in.”
Silent, she gawked at me.
My patience snapped. “Go! Now!”
Gulping at the body of her assigned partner, she staggered toward the door, and I closed the chapter of killing another green-banded. He was merely another scene in a play of war.
My feet carried me swiftly down the street, closer and closer to the Spire, and with each step, I gradually lowered my guard.
Here, no kids as young as sixteen crumpled onto the asphalt, not like three blocks before. On this road, no black-banded citizens who had joined our cause fell from the windows, pushed out by the opposition. On this sidewalk, no blood seeped into the cracks.
But the farther I went, the more suffocating the quiet became.
Faces flashed between the curtains as fearful gazes tracked my journey.
Glass shards crunched as I weaved through the bullet-riddled personal vehicles, an obstacle course of sorts.
The fog obscured the contours of ordinary objects, blurring their edges and altering them to resemble your nightmares.
My skin itched from the drying blood plastering my clothes to me, but it wasn’t anything new. The sensation was as familiar as the morning dew.
Until a glass building stood before me—towered over me.
The Spire swayed with the wind, back and forth, oscillating like a melody of life and death.
Adrenaline must have been distorting my vision.
Because a man hovered before the double glass doors. His form screamed familiarity, the sharp shoulders toned, the waist lean and honed, the short hair streaked with crimson.
Speech abandoned me.
Zion, I mouthed as I came to a halt a foot before him.
His lips curled up, stretching the deep gash in his left cheek. “I see my favorite meal has deigned to show up.”
An hour passed. A day. A week. All the while, I simply…stared at him. Marveled at his grin. At his relaxed posture. At him actually standing in front of me.
With a trembling hand, I cupped the uninjured side of his face. At the first contact, at the hint of warmth emanating from him, I breathed.
He was tangible. Not a phantom of my imagination.
Careful not to aggravate his wound, I rested my forehead against his, our sweat gluing us together. “You’re real.” As long as I could feel him, I would believe it.
“Want me to prove it to you?” His exhale ghosted over my chin. “Unzip my pants, and you’ll see how real I am for you.”
My chest rumbled with amusement. If it was possible, Zion’s brain would probably relocate to his crotch. And wreak havoc whenever blood was involved.
“Later.” I skimmed my lips against his, savoring how his chapped flesh snagged on my own. “We have a job to do.”
Once Kali arrived—because she was going to—Peter would meet his end at last.
A sigh made Zion’s shoulders slump. Mute, he scratched his chest, his nails damaging his skin, and I caught his wrist, returning it to his side.
His throat bobbed as he glanced at the double doors, the one-way glass reflecting the light instead of providing a glimpse inside.
“What is it?” I nudged.
The blue in his eyes dulled. “Amari is dead.”
The woman who had joined Zion’s catch-and-play team, the one he and Ava had personally taught the art of interrogation, of human pain points, of how to win against any opponent.
The friend to both Zion and Kali, the shadow spending all her free time either pestering Zion for more training or pulling Kali into whatever girls’ night nonsense she and Tarri could come up with.
“She’s gone?” I asked, as if the two words could change what had befallen Amari.
He nodded, his chin dipping down and rising back up in a bounce, again and again, like a spring. “Three soldiers backed her into a corner. I couldn’t reach her in time.”
My limbs transformed to stone. I opened my mouth to ask what had occurred, but then shut it before a sound escaped me. Sometimes, knowing was worse than staying in the dark.
So I just hauled Zion close. Caged him in my embrace. And winced at his grunt. The movement had likely pulled the deep laceration in his face, yet I held him tight, bordering on squishing him, unwilling to let him go.
His arms loosened around my back. “Kali,” he mumbled, his fingers catching on my shirt as he stroked down.
“She will come,” I said to assure myself more than him. My nails teased the back of his neck, the area that always liquefied him, turning him into a puddle of mush.
“No.” Wiggling out of my grasp, he gestured for me to turn around. “Look.”
On the opposite side of the street, the thick mist gave birth to a tall figure.
Like rising out of the sea, Kali emerged, the bottom of her dark green shirt missing, her navel peeking out, her cargo pants secured high on her waist. The full-body leather sheaths Zion had ordered for her during her first days at our compound dug into her flesh, framing her breasts and upper thighs.
As she marched over to us, she threw a knife high in the air, and a scarlet shower graced her with the beads of the dead. Her fair skin boasted a splatter of red, identical to the steel she was wielding.
Hopping off the curb, she ripped a rifle off her back, a standard-issue soldier’s firearm she must have picked up on her way. She positioned the butt against her shoulder, the black weapon as cold as her determination. Without a pause in her smooth tread, she aimed—
Thunder slammed into me like a tidal wave. The heavy rumbling morphed into a sharp, high-pitched screech of fracturing glass—
I yanked Zion away from the Spire’s double doors, maneuvering him to face the street so I could shield him with my body.
The one-way glass exploded, and the shards struck me like a torrent of icicles. Fragments caressed my nape, and heat trickled down to the neckline of my skintight shirt, soaking the synthetic fabric.
But the storm of glass ended as abruptly as it had begun.
“Are you okay?” I half-yelled into Zion’s ear.
“Never better.” As he replied, the tear in his cheek flapped. “And stop shouting.”
I cringed. My eardrums were ringing.
Discarding the useless rifle aside, Kali snarled, “I will skin him alive,” and kicked the few slabs of glass still standing in the door frame.
I didn’t need to ask to know she meant the Head of Ilasall, the man named Peter, the ruler of Ilasall’s land, the person Sadira and Ryder had discovered…extra details about.
The time had come to see if their suspicions carried a grain of truth or not.
“Stop drooling,” I hissed to Zion as he stepped over the threshold, following Kali inside the building and salivating like a puppy after a treat.
“I can’t.” He rubbed his bottom lip, smearing his own and probably countless soldiers’ blood across the sensitive tissue. “Want a taste?”
As I entered the lobby behind him, shards crunched under my boots, disintegrating into dust. “Oh, I will be getting more than a taste.” I was going to eat him whole.
The bulge in his pants was unmistakable, but as much as my mouth watered at the prospect of bending him over the empty security station, I erected a wall of ice around me once more.
Without a second glance at the glasslike reception desk and the three empty, sand-hued leather chairs behind it, Kali stomped toward the stairwell.
We had no knowledge of how the power worked here, so risking taking the elevators while there was a possibility of them shutting down mid-ride would have been foolish.
I pulled Zion closer to me. His muscles rippled under my palm, his shape a sculpture of exercise. “Once this is over, I will destroy you.” Smugness washed over me at the effect I had on him—his core spasmed. “You won’t be able to walk out of here.”
Kali ripped the door open to the stairwell bathed in blue by the flickering backup lights.
Zion paused in the doorway. “I never said I was above crawling,” he drawled, looking me up and down so slowly, it set me aflame.
Heat climbed up my thighs, causing them to spasm—
“Kill first, fuck later,” Kali yelled as she hovered a dozen stairs above us. A drop of red gathered on her chin, dangled, stretched—
It fell, bursting open on the metal stairs and glazing the grated treads in color.
Climbing to the first landing, Zion muttered, “Bossy.”
Such a feisty creature Kali was, with a foul mouth and a ferocious attitude, yet I didn’t want her to be anything else.
Despite us ascending the winding stairs for what felt like an eternity, floor after floor, landing after a landing, a task without an end in sight, she didn’t complain.
Didn’t stop for a break even when her muscles must have lit on fire, when sweat dotted her eyebrow, when her breaths grew labored, and not even when she had to clutch the railing for support.
She kept moving forward.
We left ten, twenty, thirty, forty floors behind us, and only when the door to the last one—the fiftieth—loomed ahead of us, did we slow.
Throughout our trek, not a single security guard had jumped us and not a sound had slipped past the closed doors in all the landings.
The building had been evacuated.
We could only hope the king of Ilasall remained in his throne—the top floor of the Spire.
As Kali wiped the sweat off her face, Zion and I copied her. My shirt had become a second skin from the moisture, and a V-shaped stain decorated the fabric in the front. The trip had injected acid into my bloodstream, and my muscles begged for me to give them a rest.
Willing their prayers to subside, I seized the door handle, the brass so cold it zapped me. “Let’s end this once and for all,” I said as I pushed the door open.
Daylight assaulted my senses, incinerating my retinas as we emerged into an…apartment. A space overtaking the entire floor, the housing fit for the commander of the city.
Plush, no-expense-spared furniture dyed milky white decorated the expanse. The walls were shaded from white at the top to black at the bottom, creating a mirage of shadows slithering across the pale wood floor, laying in wait for an opportunity to twine around your ankles.
As a short and curvy woman rose from the snow-like couch, her ash-brown hair cascaded down to her waist in ripples.
Climbing out of the sunken living room in the center of the space, she contorted her plump lips brightened by the red lipstick into a smile not quite reaching her eyes.
“Welcome.” Her high heels clacked against the hardwood floorboards. “I’m Livana.”
So she was the newest doll Peter had commandeered. About twenty years younger than him, closer to my age than his.
A green wristband dangled on Livana’s wrist as she smoothed out the wrinkles in her impossibly tight white dress. “We’ve been waiting for you.” She gestured to the man gazing out the floor-to-ceiling windows.
Even from afar, I could appreciate the view from this high up.
The city unraveled before you in a blanket of gray roofs and equally gray streets buzzing like a hive—a home for an ocean of bullets and knives, fists and elbows, cracking bones and tearing flesh.
Bodies flooded the roads, both fallen and upright.
In the mass of Ilasall’s military, the colorful clothing of our people and dark outfits of the black-banded stood out like flowers in spring, the blossoms flapping in futile attempts to avoid being crushed.
But it wasn’t the scenery that hammered against the wall of ice I had formed around myself.
It was the familiar features of the Head of Ilasall turning to face us.
The easy confidence in his tone demolished the barrier I had constructed as he said, “Hello, my son.”