Page 176 of The Amber Sunburst

“For how long?” Eudoxia insists. “The boat is right here, Alexander, we can’t just wait for him.”

Her beautiful one-track mind. Usually he loves it, but right now he can’t help but wince.

“We’re not using the boat.”

“What?”

“Come on,” Alexander says before breaking into a sprint back through Arc Eight.

“What is he doing?” Lazarus hisses to Zeno.

Zeno shakes his head. “I don’t know.”

“What happened, Alexander?” Ophelia asks, this time much softer. Zeno can’t tell if it’s genuine or if she’s just trying anything to get an explanation out of him.

Alexander sighs with his head in his hands, catching his breath from their run to the hovertrain station. His whole body is shaking with adrenaline. Lazarus is already ripping off parts of his clean shirt for tourniquets to stop the bleeding in his arm and leg.

“He was spying on us,” he finally says, and everyone stills.

Arete is the first one to speak. “Kallias?” she whispers. The waiting room in the hovertrain terminal is so empty that Zeno can hear it from where he sits.

“He’s with the Educator.” Alexander winces, lip quivering like he might cry. “But he…”

“He what?” Eudoxia prompts.

“He told them some things, kept the important ones to himself. They think we’re on the boat right now. They’ve planned an ambush.”

“But why did he have to stay behind?” Arete quietly cries.

“I don’t know,” Alexander says quietly before shrugging Lazarus off and kicking the wall hard with his injured leg. “I don’t fucking know!”

“I do,” Ophelia says.

Alexander sneers at her. “Oh, do you?”

“Look around, Alexander!” Ophelia scoffs viciously. “There are no guards here. If Kallias had run with us, they wouldn’t believe a thing he’d ever told them. There’d be Auxiliaries swarming every inch of the city. But now they’re all twiddling their thumbs at the docks, because no one has any reason to doubt that that’s where we’ll be!”

A voice over the PA system announces, “The hovertrain is departing from Arc Eight in ten minutes,” and then silence settles.

Eudoxia breaks it. “That was good of him,” she says. “We shouldn’t let his sacrifice be in vain.”

Alexander glares at her. “You guys know what to do, then. Take the hovertrain to the coast, buy a boat, and leave.”

He starts for the exit.

“What?” Zeno asks, not following.

“He did this on purpose—made me keep the decoy boat a secret. He thought I’d run down here and leave him behind. But now I’ve shown you what you need to do, so I’m going back for that sneaky fucker.”

“Alexander, you can’t leave,” Eudoxia yells after him, yanking at his bleeding arm. Alexander recoils from the pain. “Shit, sorry. But we can’t go without you.”

“I brought you here. Now you can go.”

“We know nothing about your world. We don’t know how to sail. We’d be blind out there.”

“I’m not leaving him.”

“So you’re leaving us?”