Her hands dig into my shoulders, anchoring me to her. Her lips are softer than her hands, but she kisses me like she’s trying to win an argument.
I decide to let her.
She clings to me, and my knees are suddenly unsteady. I push her against the closest tree so that I don’t do something supremely stupid like pull her down to the forest floor.
Not that there’s anyone in the Wasteland with us to see what we’re doing. For the first time in three weeks, we’re absolutely alone, and I don’t plan to waste the opportunity.
I lift my mouth from hers long enough to say, “You were right.” My voice sounds like I’ve just run the length of Lower Market at a hard sprint.
“I know,” she says, and the smug little smile at the corner of her mouth makes me want to do things I shouldn’t do, even though I know the probability of being interrupted is so insignificant, it defies mathematical calculation.
She lifts her lips toward me, and I kiss her like I never want to come up for air. A strange hum fills my head.
This is what I want. Just Rachel and the wide-open space of the Wasteland. Nobody asking my opinion. Questioning my decisions. Looking at me like somehow a nineteen-year-old boy can save them from their worst fears.
This is what I want, but it isn’t the life I’ve been given. It isn’t the path my choices—and the choices of others—have put me on, and until I see it through, until the one hundred fifty-seven survivors in my care are safe and the Commander has paid for his crimes with his life, I can’t turn back.
I can, however, wish with everything in me that things were different.
The rough bark behind Rachel scrapes against my knuckles as I fist my hands in the back of her cloak and tell myself I can’t do more than kiss her. Not now. Not here. Not while the ruins of our lives are a mere seventy yards away.
Not when she still screams herself hoarse every night in her sleep and refuses to discuss it with me when she wakes.
Her hands slide down my shoulders and over my chest until they come to rest on the Rowansmark device I wear strapped beneath my tunic every day. She scrapes her nail over the rope binding the button that sends the sonic frequency used to repel the Cursed One and pulls back to look at me.
“You tied down the button that sends the monster back to its lair.” She raises a brow. “That was smart.”
“I have my moments.”
“Yes, you do.” Slowly she pulls her hand away from the tech. “Are you sure the device is working again? I know what you said at the camp meeting, but maybe we should test it before we actually need it.”
“You want to call the Cursed One? A hundred yards from a group of survivors who might drop dead of heart failure if they have to deal with one more shock?”
“I’m just saying if I have to put my faith in something, I want to be sure it works.”
“I checked the device but didn’t see any reason for it to malfunction. I’m building a booster pack that will significantly increase the power of the tech’s sonic pulse. Once I’ve finished that, we should be able to use it without any trouble.” I lean closer, my eyes drifting toward her lips. “Give me a little more time, and it will be ready. You can put your faith in me, Rachel.”
Before she responds, I kiss her again, and this time I’m the one trying to win an argument. The bark scrapes my hands, the hum fills my head again, and I lose myself in her. She’s in every breath I take, and somehow I feel stronger than I have since I watched the last flame gutter into ash inside my city. When I pull away, she’s smiling.
“We’d better go back.” I shade my eyes as I peer up at the sun, just visible beyond the canopy of branches above us. Three hours until nightfall. Just enough time to return to camp, let Rachel run another sparring practice, and check on the tunnel’s progress.
She walks across the clearing to collect our catch. I grab her Switch from the forest floor as she pulls the arrow out of the rabbit. We work in companionable silence as I clean the arrow and she stuffs the rabbit into a burlap sack with the other small game she caught today.
I’m sliding the arrow back into its quiver when I realize the silence between us has extended into the surrounding Wasteland as well. The hush is weighted with tension as all of the little noises that usually fill the forest fade into nothing. There’s only one reason forest wildlife suddenly go silent: They’re hiding. And since they’d long since adjusted to our presence, they aren’t hiding from us.
Rachel meets my eyes as the realization hits us: We aren’t alone.
Handing over her Switch, I grab a low-hanging branch and swing into the tallest tree I can find. The bark scrapes against my skin as I dig my boots into the trunk and shinny my way toward the top. I climb nearly fifteen yards before I’m up high enough to see over the trees around me and into the Wasteland beyond.
For a moment, all looks peaceful. But then I catch movement to the east. The sharp glint of the sun glancing off metal. A flash of red.
Make that many flashes of red.
My heart pounds, and my fingers dig into the bark as a massive flock of crows explodes out of the trees twenty yards east of us and spirals into the sky, screaming their distress.
“Logan?”
A large group is traveling through the Wasteland, heading straight for Baalboden. I stare at the eastern trees for a moment, trying to count. Are we dealing with highwaymen? A battalion? Something worse?
The flashes of sun-kissed metal and red uniforms stretch as far east as I can see.
We aren’t dealing with highwaymen or a battalion.
We’re facing an entire army.
Chapter Five
RACHEL
We run hard, weapons slapping our thighs, underbrush clawing at us, while more birds spill out of the trees to the northeast. Whoever is moving toward the city is traveling fast.
A thorny bush catches my cloak, and I rip the leather free without pausing. Our people are as good as dead if we can’t reach them first.
Unless Logan already has a plan in place for something like this.
I leap a fallen branch and skid around a bend in the trail I’m hoping will get us to Baalboden’s gate before we get cut off. “If we don’t make it in time—”
“Drake knows what to do.” Logan grabs my hand when I slip on a moss-covered rock. “If anyone attacks, he’ll blow the gate.”
When we were trapped inside Baalboden’s Wall, surrounded on three sides by fire, we blew up the gate to escape death. How ironic to think we might have to blow it up again and seal ourselves back inside the Wall for the very same reason. Logan, Drake, and Thom spent days lacing explosives taken from the Commander’s personal supply and threading fuses into the gate’s rubble. Some are buried in the slabs of steel and stone that are piled across the opening. Some line the jagged walls on either side.
If Drake lights the fuse, no one will be able to get inside Baalboden.
No one will be able to get out, either.
“They’ll be trapped,” I say as we near the rough seam of land that joins the overgrown Wasteland with the flat stretch of ground between the forest and Baalboden’s western Wall.
“They’ll leave through the tunnel.”
“But if you aren’t there to protect them from the Cursed One—”
“You and I will go to the northern Wasteland, just beyond the city’s perimeter. The tech’s signal is strong enough to protect them even if I’m not underground.” Logan’s voice is breathless. Mine is too. And we still have fifty yards between us and the gate.
I fall silent as we reach the edge of the Wasteland, directly opposite the western corner of the Wall. I strain to hear something. Birds. Footsteps. The metallic kiss of a sword leaving its sheath.