Cradling my rifle, leaning my head against the tree as if I’m dozing or looking at the flakes float between the glistening bare branches, lioness in the tall grass.
Fifty yards away. The muzzle velocity of a M16 is 3,100 feet per second. Three feet in a yard, which means he has two-thirds of a second left on Earth.
Hope he spends it wisely.
I swing the rifle around, square my shoulders, and let loose the bullet that completes the circle.
The murder of crows rockets from the trees, a riot of black wings and hoarse, scolding cries. The green ball of light drops and doesn’t rise.
I wait. Better to wait and see what happens next. Five minutes. Ten. No motion. No sound. Nothing but the thunderous silence of snow. The woods feel very empty without the company of the birds. With my back pressed against the tree, I slide up and hold still another couple of minutes. Now I can see the green glow again, on the ground, not moving. I step over the body of the dead recruit. Frozen leaves crackle beneath my boots.
Each footstep measures out the time winding down. Halfway to the body, I realize what I’ve done.
Teacup lies curled into a tight ball beside a fallen tree, her face covered in the crumbs of last year’s leaves.
Behind a row of empty beer coolers, a dying man hugged a bloody crucifix to his chest. His killer didn’t have a choice. They gave her no choice. Because of the risk. To her. To them.
I kneel beside her. Her eyes are wide with pain. She reaches for me with hands dark crimson in the gray light.
“Teacup,” I whisper. “Teacup, what are you doing here? Where’s Zombie?”
I scan the woods but don’t hear or see him or anyone else. Her chest heaves and frothy blood boils over her lips. She’s choking. I gently push her face toward the ground to clear her mouth.
She must have heard me cursing. That’s how she found me, by my own voice.
Teacup screams. The sound knifes through the stillness, bounces and ricochets off the trees. Unacceptable. I press my hand down hard over her bloody lips and tell her to hush. I don’t know who shot the kid I found, but whoever did it can’t be far. If the sound of my rifle doesn’t bring him back to investigate, her screaming will.
Damn it, shut up. Shut up. What the hell are you doing out here, sneaking up on me like that, you little shit? Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Teeth scrape frantically against my palm. Tiny fingers seek my face. My cheeks painted with her blood. With my free hand, I tug open her jacket. I’ve got to compress the wound or she’ll bleed out.
I grab the collar of her shirt and rip downward, exposing her torso. I wad up the remnant and press it just below her rib cage, against the bullet hole weeping blood. She jerks at my touch with a strangled sob.
“What did I tell you about that, soldier?” I whisper. “What’s the first priority?”
Slick lips slide over my palm. No words come out.
“No bad thoughts,” I tell her. “No bad thoughts. No bad thoughts. Because bad thoughts make us go soft. They make us soft. Soft. Soft. And we can’t go soft. We can’t. What happens when we go soft?”
The woods brim with menacing shadows. Deep in the trees, there’s a snapping sound. A boot crunching on the frozen ground? Or an ice-encrusted branch, splintering? We could be surrounded by a hundred enemies. Or zero.
I race through our options. There aren’t many. And they all suck.
First option: We stay. The problem is stay for what. The dead recruit’s unit is unaccounted for. Whoever killed the kid is also unaccounted for. And Teacup has no chance of surviving without medical attention. She has minutes, not hours.
Second option: We run. The problem is where. The hotel? Teacup would bleed to death before we make it back, plus she may have taken off for a good reason. The caverns? Can’t risk going through Urbana, which means adding miles of open fields and many hours to a journey that ends at a place that probably isn’t safe, either.
There’s a third option. The unthinkable one. And the only one that makes sense.
The snow falls heavier, the gray deepens. I cup her face with one hand and press the other into the wound, but I know it’s hopeless. My bullet tore through her gut; the injury is catastrophic.
Teacup is going to die.
I should leave her. Now.
But I don’t. I can’t. Like I told Zombie on the night Camp Haven blew, the minute we decide one person doesn’t matter, they’ve won, and now my words are the chain that binds me to her.
I hold her in my arms in the awful dead stillness of the woods in snow.
I EASE HER DOWN onto the forest floor. Drained of all color, her face is only slighter darker than the snow. Her mouth hangs open, her eyelids flutter. She’s slipped into unconsciousness. I don’t think she’ll wake again.
My hands are shaking. I’m struggling to keep it together. I’m pissed as hell at her, at myself, at the seven billion impossible dilemmas their arrival brought, at the lies and the maddening inconsistencies and all the ridiculous, hopeless, stupid unspoken promises that have been broken since they came.
Don’t go soft. Think about what matters, right here, right now; you’re good at that.
I decide to wait. It can’t be much longer. Maybe after she’s dead, the softness inside me will pass and I’ll be able to think clearly. Every uneventful minute means I still have time.
But the world is a clock winding down, and there are no such things as uneventful minutes anymore.
A heartbeat after I decide to stay with her, the percussive thrum of rotors shatters the silence. The sound of the choppers snaps the spell. Knowing what matters: besides shooting, the thing I’m best at.
I can’t let them take Teacup alive.
If they take her, they may be able to save her. And if they save her, they’ll run her through Wonderland. There’s the tiniest chance that Zombie’s still safe at the hotel. A chance that Teacup wasn’t running from anything, just snuck off to find me. One trip by either of us down the rabbit hole and everybody’s doomed.
I pull my sidearm from the holster.
The minute we decide . . . I wish I had a minute. I wish I had thirty seconds. Thirty seconds would be a lifetime. A minute would be an eternity.
I level the gun at her head and lift up my face to the gray. Snow settles on my skin, where it quivers for a moment before melting.
Sullivan had her Crucifix Soldier and now I have mine.
No. I am the soldier. Teacup is the cross.
I FEEL HIM THEN, the one standing deep in the trees, motionless, watching me. I look, and then I see him, a lighter human-shaped shadow between the dark trunks. For a moment, neither of us moves. I know, without understanding how, that he is the one who shot the kid and the other members of his squad. And I know the shooter can’t be a recruit. His head does not glow in my eyepiece.
The snow spins, the cold squeezes. I blink, and the shadow is gone. If the shadow was ever there.
I’m losing my grip. Too many variables. Too much risk. Shaking uncontrollably, I wonder if they’ve finally broken me; after surviving the tsunami that took my home, the plague that took my family, the death camp that took my hope, the innocent little girl who took my bullet, I am terminal, done, finished, and was it ever in question, never if but always when?