FORTY-FOUR #3
We cut toward the service lane again, but smoke pours across the path, thick enough to swallow the lights.
Ewan fires behind us while Kaito drives a blade into the gap between a Vector soldier’s ribs, only wincing a little when the action costs his still-healing side.
Xeon appears through the haze, grabs Dakota’s arm, and pulls her clear of a shot that cracks into the wall where she’d just been standing.
For half a second, she’s against him, his hand on her arm and her hand on his chest. No bond between them, no thread or answer. Her fingers curl once in his shirt like she expected something to be there and his eyes drop to the movement.
Pain slashes through his face and disappears almost before it even really exists, and then another smoke charge hits the ground between us.
White fire blooms and my eyes burn instantly.
“Dakota!” I shout, but the smoke swallows her whole.
My bond snaps tight, and Ewan’s panic flares brightly enough to blind me.
Kaito’s bond goes cold and lethal, an echo of it strumming through my own bond with Kota.
Mine is hammering hard enough to hit nails and build a porch.
Three alarms inside her, three pulls, and through them, for one single second, I feel her reaching.
Not for us. For the quiet place inside her. For the missing thread.
“Xeon,” she chokes, but there’s nothing there to answer her.
Something slams into me from the side, and I hit the wall hard enough to crack my shoulder against concrete.
A blade swings toward my throat, the flash of it the only thing that draws my attention to it before it does any damage.
I catch the wrist, twist, and feel the bone snap under my hand.
The attacker screams while gunfire cuts through the smoke.
Rots groan somewhere too close and the chemical stink is killing every scent in the air, including honey and rain. I shove the attacker away and lunge toward the place Dakota’s bond is pulling from.
Moving.
She’s moving.
No.
Being moved.
“Fletcher!” she shouts, and the sound tears through me worse than any bullet could. It’ll haunt me long after the night ends, my heart shredding apart at the sound of her fear.
I see her shape through the smoke for all of a second. Small and fast and fighting. A masked man behind her has one arm locked around her ribs and a cloth pressed over her mouth. She drives her elbow back hard enough that he keels over a little, but then two more close in around her.
Ewan hits one from the side, dragging him down with a snarl.
Kaito reaches another.
Xeon moves like a blade through smoke, straight for Dakota.
Almost there.
Almost.
And then the western fence blows.
The explosion throws every single sound out of the world.
Heat blasts through the lane and metal screams. Rots pour through the new gap in a rot-filled wave, dead bodies climbing over one another as they enter the compound, drawn in by the shrill screeching somewhere in the smoke.
Bodies slam into the passage between us and Dakota.
I fire my rifle until it clicks empty.
Ewan is shouting.
Kaito is killing anything that crosses his path.
Xeon disappears into the wave of dead.
Dakota’s bond yanks hard.
South, then down, then suddenly thin, buried under concrete and chemicals.
Not broken or gone, just covered. Stolen.
I try to go after her when a Rot collides with my side. I drive my knife through its skull and shove it off, but another takes its place. Then another. Smoke continues to burn my eyes until the world blurs white and red.
Ewan grabs my jacket. “Fletch!”
I fight him. “Move!”
“You’re going to get buried, you dipshit!” he yells roughly, coughing through the thick smoke.
“They have her!”
His face twists like he feels the same piercing through the bond, because he does.
Kaito would too. He appears through the smoke not even a second later, blood dripping from his face and murder shining brightly in his eyes. “Where is she?”
I turn toward the pull.
South.
Down.
Away.
The bond stretches again, thin as fishing wire.
Then the chemical haze shifts and I see it.
I fucking see it. I see the service hatch behind the generator shed.
I see it open. I see a black-clad figure dropping through it with Dakota over his shoulder, her boots kicking harshly and one hand clawing at the frame.
Then the hatch slams shut.
Xeon reaches it first. He hits the metal so hard the sound of it rings out even through the sirens.
Once.
Twice.
Again.
Fucking nothing.
No bond tells him where she went, and no thread guides him to her.
He looks back at us, and for the first time in all the time I’ve known the man, I see panic make it all the way to his face. The quiet place has finally become a wound and I slam my fist into the ground until pain shoots up my arm.
Ewan makes a broken sound behind me that fucks me up just as much, and Kaito goes deadly still.
The bond in my chest pulls south again, weaker with every passing second, smothered more and more by the distance and something that has clearly been built to hide her from us.
I lift my head, blood dripping from my mouth, and force the fucking words off my tongue.
“They took her.”