“You bitch!” he screamed.
He lunged at Wendig, but she sidestepped and he slammed into the table. The soldiers sitting there grabbed their plates and scrambled away, some of them laughing. X bent down and picked up his bread off the ground. He wasn’t going to let good food go to waste.
“¡Basta!” Rhino shouted.
X had a feeling that meant “stop,” but Wendig and the sergeant didn’t seem concerned. Lurch threw a punch that sailed over Wendig as she ducked.
Moving backward, X bumped into someone, but the soldier was too busy yelling at the top of their lungs to notice X.
Wendig taunted Lurch by waving her broken arm and muttering something about a dog. That drove the spectators wild, and it worked on Lurch.
The soldier barreled toward her, screaming like a Siren. They slammed into each other, knocking Wendig backward. She let out a scream of her own and leaped onto Lurch, wrapping her legs around him.
X continued eating his bread, happy not to be the one getting his ass kicked, for once.
The brawling tangled mass slammed into a table, and Lurch bucked Wendig onto its splintery surface, knocking trays to the floor. She grabbed him with her good hand and pulled herself up by his shirt, biting his ear. Lurch screeched in agony and elbowed Wendig in her broken arm.
The two warriors fought for a few more seconds until Rhino finally grabbed Lurch by the scruff of the neck and yanked him off Wendig. Using only one hand, he lifted the sergeant a good two feet off the deck.
The other soldiers quieted down, and Rhino continued holding Lurch up, veins popping out on his massive arms while the man kicked in his grip.
Wendig got off the ground, cradling her broken arm. She bared her broken teeth like a dog.
“Get back,” Rhino said.
She hesitated, then returned to her seat, throwing X a glance, and a grin. Rhino let go of Lurch as soon as Wendig was out of punching distance, and then dropped him in a heap on the deck, gasping for air.
“Give the Immortal your food,” Rhino ordered.
Lurch glared at the lieutenant, rubbing his neck, his bloodshot eyes filled with rage. Getting up, he reached over to his table and handed his plate over.
X looked at the slop. “Is that human or monster meat? ’Cause if it is, I don’t want any.”
Rhino gave a half smile. “It’s fish.”
Shrugging a sore shoulder, X took the plate. He was hungry, exhausted, and hurting. Food would help him recover for the trip back to the Metal Islands.
Rhino said something to Wendig in Spanish, but she just shrugged and went back to her meal. So did the rest of the soldiers. The room again filled with casual conversations in several languages.
Sighing, Rhino sat beside X this time, keeping an eye on Lurch.
“He’ll be doing a lot more of that now that Whale and Fuego are gone,” Rhino said. “I’m going to miss those bastards. I fought with them for years.”
X dabbed the rest of his bread into the fresh slop. “I know what it’s like to lose friends,” he said, “but here’s what I don’t get…”
Rhino scooped up a hunk of the white fish but didn’t bring it to his mouth. “What?” he asked.
“Why the hell do you guys waste precious ammo, supplies, and, most importantly, people to kill Sirens?”
“The deformed ones?” Rhino said. He put his spoon back down and leaned forward, as if not wanting anyone to overhear.
“El Pulpo believes the Sirens give us strength when we eat them,” he said. “Normally, we don’t lose this many on our expeditions.”
Wendig looked over her shoulder at Lurch, who was talking quietly with his men. Unlike the sergeant, most of the soldiers seemed to really respect Rhino. Either that, or they feared him. X decided it was a bit of both.
You people are freaking demented, he thought.
“He will try to kill me soon,” Rhino said, without a trace of fear in his voice.
“So kill him first.” X glanced at Wendig, who was nursing her injuries. “Or maybe let her do it.”
Rhino picked a fish bone out of his teeth. “I did the same thing to get to where I am,” he said. “Killed my way to the top.”
“I’m surprised you all haven’t killed each other by now,” X said.
Rhino chuckled. “It would take a very big army to take this one down. Lurch is just one of many who want someday to be general of the main force.”
“Main force?” X asked.
The lieutenant set his spoon down and cracked his neck on one side, then the other. “You didn’t think this was all of us, did you? We’re just a platoon, Immortal.”
X swallowed his food as the realization filled him with dread.
If there were more Cazadores he hadn’t seen yet, then the Hell Divers wouldn’t have a chance, even though they had better weapons. He tried to keep calm, but all he could think about were his friends.
“How long until we get back to the Metal Islands?” X asked.
Rhino shrugged. “Depends on how long it takes us to find the missing vessels.”
“I thought we were going back to…”
“Not yet.” Rhino’s pierced nostrils flared, and he drew in a deep breath. “We’re going to meet up with another platoon—or find them, rather.”
X picked up his glass of water, trying to appear nonchalant while his mind raced with questions.
“One of our ships and some boats went missing,” Rhino said, “and that doesn’t happen very often. Not like this. Not without a trace. That’s not how it works. We have communications and beacons like in your airships. One minute, they were there, and then they were gone.”
X sipped his water and kept his poker face. This wasn’t the work of some random storm. This was his friends. They were finally coming to the Metal Islands, and they had no idea what they were up against.
Katrina had waited her entire life for this moment. So why did she feel so nervous?
Lightning sliced through the soup outside the protective glass of the USS Zion’s command center. The scene transported her back to the final moments before a dive, when the glass floor of the launch bay revealed the storms raging beneath her boots.
In a few minutes, Deliverance would arrive over their location, and in a few hours, the Hive would also show up with the rest of their people.
The final moments before the beginning of the end were finally upon her, and she felt that she was going to be sick. Everything was riding on the attack’s success.
Just twenty miles east, the barrier between dark and light awaited her on the final leg of the journey to the Metal Islands.
She picked up the receiver and checked the coordinates they had used to contact Timothy Pepper of the Sea Wolf. Several days had passed since they last spoke to the AI, and they hadn’t been able to reach him in the past several attempts.
The likelihood of Timothy sending another message was slim, but she had held on to the hope he would deliver more intel on what they were about to face. But now she feared he was disabled or worse. If he was compromised, he could doom them all.
A voice broke over the static. Eevi stood at the top of the ladder, holding a tablet that lit up her grim face.
“We’re not picking up anything on radar out there,” Eevi said. “No airships and no Cazador vessels.”
“Copy that.”
“There’s something else, Captain.”
Katrina waited for bad news.
“We lost one of the civilians from the container ship. A woman. She was too dehydrated… We couldn’t save her.”
“I’m sorry,” Katrina said. She knew they wouldn’t be able to save everyone, but the report stung nonetheless. Every life mattered now more than ever, and she had ordered her people to do everything they could to nurse those people back to health. “Once the airships arrive, we’ll have better medical supplies for the survivors,” she said. “Speaking of which, any update on what we salvaged from the container ship?”