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“I was just thinking that.” He let Maxwell take the lead as they crested the stairs onto the second floor. With small, bespectacled Maxwell being the first thing anyone saw, Garrett gave in to the temptation to pull his gun out. He held it low in front of him so that it was hidden behind Maxwell’s body but ready at a moment’s notice.
They tried the utility closet. Locked, as expected. They knocked softly, got no answer, and then turned down the long hallway. While the bloodstained carpet of the ground floor hadn’t been exactly inviting, this hall actively screamed danger. Every light had been smashed, blood smeared across the walls, doors hung open, and broken furniture clogged the hallway.
Maxwell licked his lips as he peered over the forbidding sight. “I’m going to announce us.”
“Okay.” Garrett relaxed his fingers on his gun. He couldn’t pull the trigger if he was already tense. “Good idea. We don’t have time to do a thorough search, so people are either gonna have to come to us, or they’re not coming at all.”
Maxwell stepped forward.
“Hello,” Maxwell’s voice rang out clear and confident down the hall, any echo muffled by the carpet and debris so that even his loud voice felt intimate. They started walking slowly down the hallway. “My name is Maxwell, and this is Garrett. We’re from the Resistance, and we’re here to help you.”
They heard a soft thud, and they paused. Maxwell tilted his head and spoke quietly. “In front of us?”
“Above us, I think.”
“Maybe both.” Maxwell twitched a shoulder, and they continued walking. They stepped over a broken chair and passed the doors of the first two apartments. One was still closed, but the other hung open to show the carnage inside. A toppled-over couch, a smashed table, bright curtains ripped from the windows. Maxwell raised his voice again as they approached the second pair of doors. “We don’t have much time, so we’re not going to come looking for you. But please come out, and we will help you. We can get you off the planet.”
They didn’t hear another thud. They didn’t hear any more sounds at all, all the way to the end of the hall.
“Just keep talking,” Garrett murmured as they started up the next flight of stairs. “They’ll either come out or they won’t.”
“It’s safe on Carta.” Maxwell’s voice echoed up the stairwell. “It’s hot, and it smells awful”—Garrett stifled a snort—“But it’s safe.”
They paused in the hallway before stepping out onto the carpet. This was where they had heard the thud, Garrett was sure. Judging by Maxwell’s hesitation and the rigidity in his spine, he was sure too. But he stepped forward.
“I’m a doctor,” Maxwell called. “I grew up in Jute near Kaston. My mother was the doctor there, and then I became the doctor when she passed.”
Garrett didn’t know that. Maxwell never talked about his past.
“We just want to help. We just want to get you out of here.”
They had passed the midline of the hallway now. Maxwell’s shoulders slumped.
“But we don’t have much time. We have to leave. We’ll try to come back.”
Maxwell came to a stop at the end of the hall between the last two closed doors. He turned slowly toward Garrett, and Garrett’s heart twinged in his chest. “Maxwell.”
“I just hate to—”
Then a woman screamed.
The door beside Maxwell burst open.
A man barreled out of it and slammed into the slight doctor, and they both careened through the door across the wall, splintering the weak wood.
“Maxwell!” Garrett spent only a moment gaping at the empty space where Maxwell had been just a second ago. Yellow gas spilled out from the door that had burst open, but Garrett rushed through it and the remnants of the door Maxwell had been thrown through.
“You won’t take them! You can’t have them!” A human man had Maxwell on his back on the ground, wrestling him and screaming.
But Maxwell had wrapped his legs around the man’s waist and his arms around the man’s neck in a strong guard. He’d tucked his head tight against the man’s shoulder so the man couldn’t strike at him.
“It’s okay, you’re okay, you’re safe!” Even with the man clawing and ripping at him, Maxwell yelled reassurances.
But Garrett couldn’t find pity over the fear and the primal instinct to crush the man who had just gotten his hand around the back of Maxwell’s neck. He roared and rushed the man, body slamming him so hard Garrett felt him go slack, and he ripped him free of Maxwell. They went over into a pile of broken glass, the shards digging into Garrett’s knees and forearms as he fought for the dominant position.
“Garrett, don’t!” Maxwell’s voice echoed in Garrett’s head as though from very far away. Garrett wrestled himself to kneeling until he sat up atop the man’s chest. He pointed his pistol down. “No!”
“Daddy!”
