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Martha brought Sebastian’s attention back to her with a kind grip on his hand. “Start at the beginning.”
And so Sebastian did.
He told them about the day it took him to get out to Orin and about the ship he saw leaving as he waited to find an opening, and Joan interrupted for her first question.
And from there, it took off into a barrage of questions interspersed with Sebastian’s painstakingly detailed narration. His mouth had dried by the time he got to the part where he escaped the planet, turning his tongue heavy and his mouth fuzzy. In his stillness, the pain from his wound had crystallized into a clarity that made it possible to feel every single suture, pulling and rubbing through his skin.
When he got to the part of the story where he arrived in Kaston and paid a visit to Hess, he forced himself not to glance at the man hovering in the corner of his eye. He resisted the urge to swallow or hedge and skipped lightly over their tryst and on to infiltrating the base. Neither Martha nor Joan batted an eye.
And then nausea set in. At first, Sebastian couldn’t feel it through the pain of the gash nearly cutting him in half, and then he couldn’t feel it through the wall he had put up against the pain, but it grew and grew until it choked him, and he had to pause to swallow it down.
“What’s wrong?” Joan looked up from tapping on her tablet when he paused mid-sentence.
“Nothing.” Sebastian shook his head and continued, even as a cold sweat broke out over his forehead and along his neck.
He didn’t want to go back there.
His heart rate picked up as he retraced his steps beside Colin down into the armory. He could feel his pulse in his sutures. He stared up at the ceiling and clenched his jaw.
He didn’t want to go back to these memories, but he told them about finding the faulty guns and about the bell ringing and about Sheila appearing to get Colin out.
Martha’s hand twitched around his own, and he paused and glanced at her. Joan and Hess looked at her as well, and a tick appeared in her jaw as she ground her teeth together. She had miscalculated. Sheila had been Martha’s risk, and it had cost them all everything and they all knew it. Sebastian rotated his wrist so he could grasp her hand.
“Continue,” she said after a moment.
Sebastian unstuck his dry mouth. “Well, after that…it… That was when…”
His heart beat in his chest, pounding blood painfully through his wounds. His skin broke out in a cold, clammy sweat and none of his breaths pulled in enough oxygen. He squeezed his eyes shut as though that would keep his memory frozen in that moment just before the gas began to hiss in through the vents.
He had been so focused on surviving in all the time between that moment and this that he hadn’t ever really gone back. He hadn’t sat with what he had seen, hadn’t thought about it, hadn’t remembered it, but it was all rushing back now faster than he could handle.
The horror and terror.
The senseless violence of his friends and comrades.
The screams of the children in the basement.
“Sebastian.” Hess’s voice snapped through the air and landed on Sebastian like a slap.
Sebastian wrenched his eyes open and turned his head to face Hess.
Hess stared at him, jaw set, shoulders tight, arms crossed, and fingers digging into his own biceps so hard the tips were white.
Sebastian felt perfectly caged in that gaze, as though Hess’s glare had put up iron bars all around him. As though he couldn’t get out and nothing could get in. His heart rate slowed, and the sweat dried on his throat. He licked his lips and took as deep a breath as his body could handle.
Hess nodded slightly with just the tiniest thread of approval. “Tell us what happened.”
So Sebastian did.
With as much detail and detachment as he could, he described the gas as it had issued from the vents and filled the room. He described the mounting panic in Colin’s and Sheila’s eyes and the chaos that ensued when the other soldiers forced the door open.
He told them about his mad scramble to escape and about the screams and pleas that had filled the air. About the killing and the blood and the Klah’Eel waiting for them outside the building.
“How did you escape?” Joan cocked her head with a small frown.
Sebastian twitched a shoulder in as much of a shrug as he could manage. “Slipperiness and luck. And the fact that I could still think, unlike everyone else. It affected my human body, but not me. I wasn’t the only one to escape, though. Others made it into the alleyways.”
“And they gunned down everyone who didn’t,” Martha concluded.
