Chapter 74 Kali
KALI
“Kali,” Gedeon growled.
I bolted.
Toward the commotion, toward the adjoining street, toward the friend who’d welcomed me with open arms despite my reluctance and taught me what it meant to care for someone.
Asphalt provided much-needed friction as I ran down the street, aiming toward where I’d heard Eislyn call out her partner’s name.
Green-banded’s apartment buildings blurred in my peripherals, as quiet as the fallen filling the street in a stream. I leaped over one corpse after another, pushing past the pain hammering my ankles with each jump.
Ignoring Gedeon’s and Zion’s shouts behind me, I mentally nudged my legs to work faster. Wind howled in my ears, slithered under my clothes, and crawled through my veins.
But despite the pulsing twinges in my pinkie, the dull throbbing in my head, the warmth trickling from my temple and down the side of my face, my cramping muscles, and the thousand pangs wracking my body, I persevered.
The street corner was right there, just a few feet from me, but the clamor had died down, vanished, dissipated like the early morning fog.
I prayed to the gods sailing the stars to protect my friend, to harbor her from the demise wreaking havoc around us. It felt like death itself had come to collect its debts.
Darting around the corner, I came to a sudden halt just in time to avoid crashing into a petite figure.
“Eislyn,” I screeched at the back of a woman limping away from me.
Her round shoulders twitched. She twisted around, her jaw falling as she spotted me. “Kali.” Leaning against the gray wall of a ten-story-tall dwelling, she panted. “You’re alive.”
“Well, yeah.” Scrutinizing the eerily noiseless road, I marched up to her. “We got rid of the Head of Ilasall.”
“But I saw the Spire explode.” She blew her chocolate bangs upward, exposing the deep laceration running diagonally from her hairline to her eyelid that rattled my bones. “We thought—” She hissed, pressing a hand to her belly, far from swollen at such an early stage of pregnancy.
“What’s wrong?” I leaped to her side, trying to yank her sand-hued sweater up to her chest so I could examine her. “Eislyn, where does it hurt?” Her face contorted from pain, her dimpled chin trembling, and I begged her, “Please, Eislyn, please, tell me.”
If she wouldn’t let me see for myself, all I could do was trust her. She was the second-in-command to the doc, not I. I had to know what her wounds were to help her.
She gave me a weak smile. “It’s my abdomen.”
Without further encouragement, she let me move her arms aside. Alarms blared in my head as I stared at the two bullet holes right above her navel and a gash so deep it gushed blood in pulses.
I covered her wounds to hopefully staunch the bleeding. “What— What do I do?” Heat poured through my fingers as they slipped across her flesh, the sticky substance prohibiting me from exerting pressure. “Eislyn, what—”
“I need to find Eli.” She gazed at the end of the street, the resignation in her brown eyes causing a flash of cold to blast me.
I shoved it away. Panic had no place in war. Now, logic… It sat in the driver’s seat. And it told me if I pushed Eislyn into the hands of medical staff, she would survive. She would.
She would.
“We need to take you to the hospital.” Throwing her left arm over my shoulders, I grunted from the majority of her weight falling on me. “Which way is the closest one?”
Her and her teams’ task was to take over the three major ones, cutting off Ilasall’s arteries of med support and leaving their injured soldiers to fend for themselves. She, and only she, knew which hospital we should head to.
“No,” she objected, so sternly it caused my steps to falter. I hadn’t heard her exert her wishes so firmly before. “It’s too far.”
I dragged her along the sidewalk, around the deceased littering the road like ragged dolls. “But—”
“I have to find Eli. He—” She cried out as we maneuvered around an overturned silver vehicle.
“He left us to join the fight in another neighborhood.” As we trudged over a pile of the dead, all marked with black bands on their wrists, she wheezed.
“I couldn’t continue working without him.
” Her confession fluttered out in a whisper. “I just…can’t.”
Her murmur beat against my ribs like a mallet.
I understood her. If I was in her place, I’d want the same. I’d spent the hike to the Spire in a daze, chopping the soldiers one by one, and only when I’d spotted Gedeon and Zion had the haze lifted.
“Okay.” I hoisted her higher on my side. “I’ll take you to him.” Wherever he was.
I didn’t dare a glimpse back to see if Zion and Gedeon were following us. The absence of the scuff of their boots and the lone gunshots gave me the answer.
The sole reason they’d leave me be was if they were tackling an obstacle between us.
The war was far from over.
One, two, three, four, five streets faded behind us as we delved deeper into the city, pausing at each corner so Eislyn could take a break.
We ducked behind bullet-warped buses to hide from soldiers, prayed to whoever would listen to us to clear the path for us, and nodded in appreciation to Ilasall’s residents covering our backs instead of ensuring our departure to whichever realm came next.
As we turned another corner, similar to any of the countless we’d already passed, Eislyn perked up. The sudden shift of her weight caused me to stagger, and I teetered, willing my failing legs to hold up.
Because at the far side of the road, a tall, lonely figure was staggering in the middle of the road.
Using his rifle as a cane, Eli surveyed the intersection, the white paint of crosswalks streaked in scarlet.
“Eli,” Eislyn murmured, swiping away the blood dripping from the deep cut in her forehead.
Beckoned by her call, Eli’s attention landed on us, and a blow of air carried Eislyn’s name from him to us. At once, he began hobbling in our direction, his gun hitting the asphalt like a drum, his no-longer-blond hair whipping at his nape, the waves dark red.
Despite the stain on his shoulder, where his basil-green sweater had turned brownish, the rips and tears, the strip of fabric wrapped around his thigh, he plodded toward us.
Eislyn’s wheezing spurred me on, renewing my efforts in hauling her down the street.
“Hold on,” I gritted out, adjusting my hold on her. “We’re right there.”
Thirty feet from us, Eli’s mouth stretched into a smile, and the jagged scar flowing from the corner of his lips to his jaw stretched out. “Eisly—”
He lurched left.
As if struck by something invisible.
Time stopped, and so did Eislyn and me. Her weight eased off my shoulders as she stood taller, her spine ramrod straight.
A second ticked by. Eli’s face grew slack, his head slightly tilted aside.
Another one, and his rifle clattered to the ground. But he didn’t bend to pick it up. He remained in a relaxed stance, staring ahead and yet at nothing at the same time.
A third, at the end of which he…collapsed on the asphalt. Sagged precisely like a person with a bullet in their skull.
My fingertips grew numb. The street began to undulate under my feet. And Eislyn's gut-wrenching scream paralyzed me to my toes. My joints became icicles, unbending, locked, as the blood-pumping organ in my chest paused its thundering.
“Eli,” she sobbed, and before I knew it, I was pulling her with me.
Step after step, I heaved Eislyn down the road. Breath after breath, I wished for Eli’s lungs to inflate. Grunt after grunt, my facade of courage fractured as Eislyn’s wailing ebbed into a wheeze until finally, it…hushed.
The neighborhood vanished from my peripherals, dissipated like swirls of steam, my sight fixed on the unmoving shape of a man who’d taught me how to fight together with Zion, who’d become Eislyn’s salvation, who’d been a part of the family I’d built.
“Come on.” I uncurled her arm from my neck—
She slumped.
I almost barreled into the ground with her, catching her by the waist at the last moment.
“You have to help me. I can’t hold you up myself,” I ground out, trying to stay upright with her leaning against me. Flames weaved around my sinews, snapped my tendons, set my muscles ablaze, but I didn’t care about their state.
Because a winter storm had frozen me from how Eislyn gave no answer to my plea.
Straining, I lowered us both beside the man lying on his back and gazing into the drab sky. My knees banged on the asphalt with such force the pain radiated all the way to my eyes.
“Eislyn.” I raised her chin—
A glassy look met me.
Utter vacantness raged in her eyes.
“No.” My soul withered like a basil plant left in the sun for too long.
“Please, gods, no.” Nausea crept up my esophagus as her body fell on the asphalt.
“No,” I whispered. “You have to live, Eislyn. Live.” I traced my friend’s features, searching for a hint of life and finding none.
“Live, please—” My voice cracked. “Live, Eislyn.”
Her name quivered off my tongue again and again as I stroked her tear-streaked face. The dampness permeated my skin, imbuing me with hatred for Ilasall, so fierce I threw my head back, presenting myself to the assault of the day’s fog.
An unrepressed scream shredded my throat, announcing my location to anyone on a hunt, and I wished for them to succeed.
Because the fire flowing down my cheeks was nothing compared to the realization that two individuals of my family had died before they could reach each other. Fall in an embrace. Have the child they cared deeply about before it was even born.
With shaking hands, I took both of theirs and clasped them together, closed their eyes, one set brown and the other amber, and prayed for my friends to awaken.
But they didn’t.
They were locked out of this world.
If only I could’ve traded my soul for theirs. I would’ve done it in an instant. Accepted any bargain offered by the guardians of the other side.
As if someone had heard my pleas, I felt a phantom brush of evil. The fleeting touch dragged my attention to a stocky soldier hovering at the end of the street.
Ilasall’s military.
Catching his gaze, I graced him with another scream. My lips trembled, ripped, and bled from the emotion rising from my throat, my being.
He staggered back, a rifle dangling in his arms, the weapon as black as his helmet, as dark as his intentions, as deadly as his orders.
But he didn’t aim the firearm at me. No, he simply surveyed the crossroad and dashed left, the street corner obscuring his journey, harboring him from me.
Coward.
“Why?” The question tumbled out of me as I swiped a blond lock away from Eli’s nose, and the end of it dropped into the small puddle of crimson gathered below his ear.
“Why them?” I tugged Eislyn’s sweater down, covering the gash and the two holes in her lower abdomen.
The notion that three lives had perished at the hands of the city churned in my stomach, spurring the bile to rise up.
“You should’ve taken me instead,” I whispered to everyone and no one, to the sky and to the earth, to the sea miles away and to the life still flowing in my veins.
A flutter of wind carried a maple leaf over to us, whirled it around the two corpses resting before me, as if nature itself was blessing them.
Perhaps this was the universe giving me a sign, encouraging me to keep going, to keep fighting, but…
I couldn’t take it anymore.
What was the point of fighting, if not for freedom, for the prospect of a better tomorrow?
Witnessing my family being torn at the seams, slaughtered, it painted a picture of a different future. One where I was alone, standing on top of a pile of the deceased, each fallen a person I knew.
Thud.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
The repetitive thumps echoing somewhere far away matched my pulse, lulled me, led me into a trance. I laced Eli’s and Eislyn’s fingers together, weaving them into a knot so they could be together—
Rough hands grabbed my shoulders. “Let’s go!”
So the thumps had been footfalls.
“Kali,” a familiar voice yelled, but my body refused to cooperate. There was no reason to move. We’d lost the war the instant my family had been cleaved apart.
“Is that…” Sadira crouched down beside me, the hundreds of her thin ebony braids twined into a high bun. Grime as dark as her complexion coated her soft features.
I nodded. Or at least I thought I did. Without anyone to confirm it, I wasn’t sure my muscles had listened to my commands.
“Shit.” Her curse rode out on a sigh, hooking around me and coaxing me to take a better look at her. She was supposed to be with Ryder, searching for a way to regain access to the city gates. This neighborhood wasn’t where—
I didn’t know what this neighborhood was. Or whether it’d housed black- or green-banded. Or…anything, if I was being truthful.
All I knew was that a string of tiny lead cylinders penetrated sheets of metal somewhere nearby. The sound of bullets repeatedly striking a car was unmistakable.
“We have to go.” Leaping to her feet, Sadira yanked on my upper arm, coercing me to rise. “Ardaton’s military is here.”
As she tugged me along with her, my feet twined. I couldn’t stop staring at the bodies of my two friends. They were so still.
Without stopping, Sadira shook my shoulders. “Do you even hear me?”
The world shook in my vision, but the tremors didn’t restart Eli’s and Eislyn’s hearts.
“You have to wake up.” Hissing at my lack of response, she shoved me down the road. “I hate to abandon them, but we have no choice. If we stay here, we’re dead. Fucking Ardaton is coming this way.”