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Leon skidded to a halt in front of the cruiser, then slammed into the side of it as a weight hit him from behind.
“Do not get into that vehicle, Hess.” Mal’ik’s hard voice cut through Leon’s dizziness from his impact with the cruiser, and Leon twisted and lashed out to unpin himself.
“I have to! He’s still back there.” Leon managed to get an arm between them and bring an elbow up under Mal’ik’s jaw. He had to fucking get back to Sebastian.
Mal’ik grunted and fell back, but with the awkward angle, Leon hadn’t been able to get enough force to knock him out of the fight. “He was gassed, Hess.”
“He doesn’t go down that easy.” Leon itched to take the inch of space he had to try to get into the cruiser again. The seconds ticked away and away, and Sebastian’s chances went with them, but if he let his guard down even the slightest bit, Mal’ik would be on him. “He’s still fighting and I can’t leave him back there.”
“You have to!” Mal’ik crouched low with his hands up, side-stepping this way and that to find an opening. “You can’t be caught here, Hess. You’re too important—”
“He’s too important!” Leon yelled, his voice rising and his hands shaking. His cold sweat made him shiver. “And I left him there. I brought him to a doomed town, and then I left him, and I can’t leave him—”
Mal’ik feinted left and charged right, and Leon was ready. He lowered his shoulder and planted it into Mal’ik’s chest, not willing to dodge out of the way and farther from the cruiser’s door. The shock of the impact jittered through his smaller frame, but he still managed to cock an arm back and land a solid uppercut to Mal’ik’s core before Mal’ik locked him in a vice-like grip.
“Hess, look at your men,” Mal’ik snarled in his ear as he clamped his strong arms around Leon in a painfully tight hold, pinning his limbs to his body, too close for Leon to get another strike in. His metal arm dug into Leon’s side, pressing bruises into his ribs. “Look.”
Leon struggled, unseeing and intent only on getting back. Sebastian was dying. Sebastian needed him. Slowly, inexorably, Mal’ik squeezed so tight, Leon’s lungs started to collapse. Leon saw stars, and his vision closed in.
When he finally went limp, Mal’ik loosened his hold, and Leon gulped in a desperate breath. When his vision cleared, he looked beyond them.
His soldiers stared at them with wide eyes. Confusion and muttering rushed between them. More soldiers ran out of the alleyways and stopped at the sight of the scene. Martha snapped at them to move to the evacuation ships, but they didn’t answer to her; they answered to him.
“You are making a scene,” Mal’ik growled firmly but quietly and almost kindly. “They are watching you to figure out what to do.”
Leon let out a shuddering breath, and his core went cold and dark. He opened his mouth as his world crashed in on itself. “They need to leave. We all need to leave.”
“That’s right.”
Mal’ik let him go, and Leon stepped out toward his men with his shoulders back and his head held high as though he hadn’t just been in a fistfight with their new klah’eel captain and still had the blood oozing from his split lip to show for it.
“To the evacuation ships! Now! Go!” Leon jabbed one finger toward Martha and waved with the other hand. “Follow Hyland! Go now!”
Leon allowed himself one quick thought of Sebastian: a frozen image of him with a cocked hip and confident smirk—all his many bodies rapidly changing in and out, but Sebastian always the same—then pushed him resolutely away.
He and Mal’ik ran the evacuation of their post with a few scattered reports of evacuations at the other barricades. The old ships they’d procured and hoped to never have to use groaned under the weight of the soldiers crammed into them, two, sometimes three times the licensed capacity, but they all took off.
Mal’ik, Martha, and Leon slid into place in the last ship to leave their base among the gunners who had stayed to cover the retreat, the sounds of air battles still raging around them. The small handful of gunships they had was doing magnificently, but the Klah’Eel ships were still sweeping closer and closer.
“You should have been on the first one,” Martha growled at him as they lifted from the ground faster than was safe, with the ship shaking. He was pressed against the hull, Mal’ik to one side of him and Martha to the other, neither apparently willing to let him out of their sight again.
“I was not going to be the first person to abandon my post.” Leon leveled a glare at her. “I had to see at least some of my men out.”
Even if one in particular was left behind…
“This is the ship most likely to be shot down, and if you go down with it—”
“He’s on a ship, Martha. Let him be.” Mal’ik came to Leon’s rescue, and while Leon hated being defended like that as though he were a fragile child, he felt fucking fragile, and he didn’t need Martha’s scolding.
Martha pressed her lips so tightly together Leon knew another scolding was in his future, but at least it wouldn’t be at this moment. Finally, she looked away, over the heads of their men and out one of the small windows at Kaston’s lights as they sped over it, low and fast.
It didn’t matter. There was nothing Martha could say that Leon was not already berating himself with.
Fool.
Overly emotional fool.
Foolish to the point of treacherous.
