Chapter 73 Kali
KALI
Rat-tat.
I startled. The concrete my elbow was resting on had vibrated, as if struck upon. No—knocked upon.
Like a response to my wordless plea, a feeble groan emanated through the gaps in the pyramid of debris.
“Zion.” Raising my voice to catch his attention, I yelled again, “Zion!” Or more like croaked out his name. A knot obstructed my vocal cords.
He rushed to me, stumbling over the pieces of the Spire, leaping over the rusted metal rods and crunching glass shards glittering all over. “What? What is it?”
“I heard something.” I waved at a couple of thick chunks of concrete harboring a life. “I think someone is trapped inside.” I couldn’t convince myself to speak my hopes aloud. What if the wind snatched them away, erasing any possibility of them seeing the light of day?
It was foolish of me, I knew that, but after being bathed in Ilasall’s military’s blood, learning the Head of Ilasall was Gedeon’s father, hacking off his head, and surviving an explosion, my imagination should be allowed to run rampant.
“Can you help me lift this?” Zion indicated a slab, which had been either a part of a floor or a ceiling. “I can’t move it with only one hand.”
Nodding, I began prying it away. My fingers slipped and dragged across the jagged contours of the piece, the roughness abrading my palms and slicing my flesh, but it didn’t budge. So much for all the workouts.
But then Zion’s good arm joined mine, and straining, grunting, screaming, we shoved the large fragment away.
Falling to his knees, he studied the deep pit we’d opened up.
“Zion,” someone rasped from below, and that wheeze, that whisper, it dragged me to the edge.
“Gedeon,” Zion and I breathed simultaneously.
A grimy hand peeked out of the hole, and we grabbed it, twisting it around, scrutinizing it for any injuries, yanking on it—
Cursing, Gedeon pulled his limb out of our grasp. His pained grunt slapped me in the face.
“Sorry,” I mumbled, squeezing my fists and choking from disturbing the fracture in my pinky.
“You didn’t know,” Gedeon said from the darkness. “I think my lower ribs might be broken.”
Zion scowled at the pyramid of rubble imprisoning Gedeon. “If we move any of these blocks, the rest will fall on top of you.”
“And I can’t pull myself out.” A heavy sigh echoed in the gloom. “Great.”
I shifted as the wreckage dug into my knees. “So what do we do?”
Zion tugged the ends of his hair. His gaze flicked around, one circle, two, three, four—
“See those?” He pointed out the smaller fragments making up what you could call the entrance to the pyramid. “If we can remove them, the structure should hold.”
“And one of us can descend to help him crawl out,” I finished for him.
“Exactly.” Grabbing hold of the first chunk, Zion smiled wryly. “This is why you learn to wield weapons in both hands.”
I shook my head at his attempt to lighten the mood. “Not funny.”
But even with the ruined finger and wrist, in less than an hour, we had freed Gedeon out of his prison. As we hurried to check him for any additional wounds, so did he, fussing over me the longest despite me rolling my eyes and promising Zion had already done so.
“He’s used to fighting with his feet barely holding him up, but you are not,” Gedeon cut off my string of protests as he prodded my ankles.
“Stop coddling me, or your ribs won’t be the only thing that’s broken.” I gave his crotch a pointed look.
He chuckled, further stoking my irritation at their overprotectiveness. At this point, the suspicion they would always treat me as if I was made out of porcelain had taken root.
Huffing, I turned my back to both of them and stomped deeper into the ruins on a hunt for a way out. Steady footfalls trailed me, imbuing me with smugness. They could shield me as much as possible, but the bastards knew when to stay back.
Like when my emotions were all over the place. Today had transformed them into a jungle with trees sky-high and branches as thick as my thighs. I couldn’t figure out what I was feeling anymore.
But the longer we walked, the slower my pulse raced. Tiredness set in, the exhaustion affecting our pace and tempting us to lay down. Soon, I couldn’t think about anything else but taking the next step. And the one after that. And another one.
But the lower we descended, the better Spire had held up.
We didn’t need to duck or slither through tight spaces anymore—we could finish our journey by climbing down the stairwell.
The lower floors had barely been affected besides crumbs of paint and plaster covering every single corner, including the empty security station in the lobby.
“Were they warned of us coming?” I mused as we headed for the exit. “Neither of the six Heads are here.”
“They’re probably hiding,” Zion scoffed as we stepped outside, into the street that now boasted fallen bits and pieces of the Spire. And the dead.
Rivers of corpses.
Bodies lay sprawled on the sidewalks, thrown over garbage cans, curled around streetlamps, slumped against apartment buildings, strewn on their backs across the road or on their bellies atop the hoods of green-banded’s personal vehicles, all shining in silver.
Puddles of blood seeped into the asphalt, staining it for eternity.
Crooked limbs formed a pattern of agony.
The gray, black, and white clothing of the black-banded absorbed the crimson flowing out of their chests and heads.
Our own people dotted the road like flowers in a grassy field, their outfits as colorful as petals.
To finish it all off, Ilasall’s soldiers marred the street, their eyes glazed over, free of the city’s clutches.
A battle had broken out while we’d been paying a visit to the Head of Ilasall, and we had missed it all.
“We have to find them,” Gedeon ground out, meaning the Heads of Nutriment, Education, Labor, Health, Military, and Welfare, the latter my former employer, the one whose genitalia I wanted to shove down his throat.
He deserved to choke on his balls for considering population control to be welfare.
Studying the faces of the fallen, Gedeon added, “Otherwise, this will keep going until there’s no one left.”
Plodding through the flood of death, jumping over gnarled bodies and slit necks, I clenched my teeth, focusing on the twinge in my molars instead of the squelching sounds our boots made as we disturbed the glossy surface of small scarlet pools.
“Is that…” I trailed off as hair as silver as the cars pierced by bullets came into view.
Gedeon and Zion crouched down beside the elderly woman. Stroking the wrinkles framing her once bright eyes, Gedeon murmured, “Zola.”
The contact who’d helped us deliver the packages to the Heads of Ilasall, Military, and Welfare last autumn.
The woman who’d served as the leader of the opposition residing inside Ilasall.
The one I’d met only two times, but more than enough to learn that wisdom had lived in her words and humor in her smile.
My legs gave out. “No.” I brushed down her cream sweater, the knitted fabric soaked in her blood. Four stains indicated the fatal wounds, one in her chest and three in her stomach.
Zion covered my hand with his own. “She’s gone.”
The contrast between the dryness of his palm and the wetness of Zola’s sweater forced me to wrench my limb away. “Fuck this,” I hissed as I stood. “I won’t accept more deaths. First Tarri, then Amari, and now Zola. How many of our friends are going to fall because we couldn’t get there in time?”
“That’s war, Kali.” Gedeon closed Zola’s eyes, her body still malleable for the folds of skin to be maneuvered. “Victory always demands a price.”
I rubbed my chest, trying to erase the void residing in the center of it. “What’s the point of winning if there’s no one to celebrate it with afterward?”
Rising back up, he bore into me. “You have us.”
“It’s not the same.” I threw my head back, willing the mist suffocating the city to dry my tears. “I can’t lose the only family I’ve ever had, Gedeon.”
Ilasall’s military had begun to scythe our friends one by one, and their images flashed in my mind, each with a big bold X over it—eliminated.
Those crisscrossing lines crucified me.
Zion pulled a handgun out of the closest soldier’s holster, nodding to himself when he found the weapon loaded. “Here, take this.” He offered the firearm to Gedeon. “We still have unfinished business with—”
A thunder of bullets cut him off.
In the quiet that followed, a lonely, as delicate as a daisy, voice rang out, “Eli!”
No.
Eislyn was supposed to stay at the main hospital after she and Eli had dropped the package at the water plant, trusting our contacts to poison the military’s water supply.
Backing away from Zion and Gedeon, I watched how their faces twisted in horror as they realized what I was about to do.