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Sebastian had never heard Colin’s voice that panicked, but he ignored it and instead banged on the door behind him.
“Get out,” he screamed through the heavy metal, desperately hoping they would hear him. He looked down, and his stomach dropped to see the gas slipping out the gap under the door and into the hallway…where all their men were. He slammed his fist against the door. “Get out of the hall! It’s a trap! Run! It’s a trap!”
“Move!” Colin’s grabbed Sebastian’s shoulders and yanked, but Sebastian held on to him. The momentum took them both spinning away from the door. Sebastian’s grip slipped on Colin’s sweat-slicked skin, and Sebastian realized his own body was also sweating profusely.
His heart hammered, and his lungs heaved, but his mind, safely encapsulated in his true torvar form, stayed his own.
“Colin, it’s okay. It’s okay!” Sebastian tried to force Colin’s wild eyes to meet his own. “The gas won’t hurt you. It’s okay! It’s just fear, Colin. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“Get out of my way!” Colin swung at Sebastian, and Sebastian had to let go to dodge the blow.
He’d lost hold of Colin, and he’d lost track of Sheila. Just as Sebastian remembered about her, she opened the door to the armory, and it swung open and crushed her behind it. A mass of Resistance soldiers rushed in, screaming and yelling in a frenzy.
A wall of bodies slammed into him and knocked him to the ground, and Sebastian just managed to roll behind a shelf before he was trampled.
The gas was everywhere, blinding him and suffocating him with its sickly-sweet smell. His heart raced, and the cacophony of screaming and begging and shrieking roared in his ears. He almost pulled his claws out of Neumann’s brain, the sensory overload too much, but to leave his body lying prone would be a death sentence.
He had to get out.
These people were his friends, but these people weren’t themselves.
He scrambled around the shelf and toward a door and came face-to-face with a semi-automatic rifle. He ducked, and a spray of bullets soared over his head. The gunshots rang in his ears. Bodies fell behind him, and his foot slipped on blood.
People pushing in and out clogged the door. He shoved and pushed and wriggled, trying to ignore the sound of gunfire and battle and the certainty that he would feel a line of bullets tearing across his back at any second.
And then a bloodcurdling chorus of screams issued on instinct, over the fear that had a hold of them all.
“Grenade!”
* * *
Leon would never admit to how eager he was to get out of the land cruiser at the western barricade. It wasn’t a long drive—the streets were near empty in anticipation of the coming assault—but the stretch of sitting in tense silence with Captain Mal’ik had been near unbearable. He had never felt quite so inadequate in all his life, and he had been feeling inadequate for as long as he could remember.
He had also never felt so exposed, tensing up every time Mal’ik’s nostrils flared, certain that the klah’eel smelled Sebastian and sex on him.
As soon as Leon’s feet hit the ground, he slammed the door shut behind him and snapped at the guard that had greeted them. “Where’s Hyland?”
The man’s eyes widened, and he took a step back. He pointed to an apartment block just in front of them. “T-top of that building, sir.”
Leon nodded and made for the building without bothering to orient Mal’ik. The man probably already knew the city from the time he had invaded it. He would figure out how to make himself useful.
Martha Hyland, who half the Resistance called Martha as though she was a kindly great-aunt, was standing at a window with a data tablet in her hands when Leon found her. She was alone, staring into the distance and idly tapping her finger on the edge of her tablet. Leon closed the door behind him and let some of the tension fall out of his shoulders with a sigh.
She turned at the sound and smiled. “Leon. I was wondering when you’d get here.”
“Quick as I could.” Leon came to stand by the window next to her and looked out to Kuval Ridge. He couldn’t see the Klah’Eel buildup directly, but he could see the flicker of lights against the low clouds.
“I don’t doubt it.” Martha brought up a few things on her tablet and handed it to him. “We’re in a good position.”
Leon blinked a few times and forced his tired eyes to absorb all the numbers and lines in front of them. Supply caches, amounts, locations, and estimates for how long they’d hold out. Martha Hyland was the head of operations for the Resistance and had been since the Resistance was only three people. They’d have never grown to be what they were without her.
He handed the tablet back. “Are we really?”
“As best we could be. Except for the obvious.”
“The traitor.” Leon squeezed his eyes shut, allowing himself to show a weakness he’d never shown to anyone except the woman who had fed and clothed him when he was nothing but a war orphan. “Farlon would have never had a traitor at a time like this.”
“Farlon never managed to see a time like this,” Martha said with enough sharpness to make him open his eyes. “He dreamed about it plenty, and he knew you could get us there. And here we are.”
