“And leave you behind?” I said, forcing a smile. “I’m pretty sure I just got docked points in a training exercise a few days ago for not working with my team and leaving them behind.”
He frowned, and the soft light of the open curtains revealed more pain in his eyes, the skin wrinkled around them. I was reminded, again, of how handsome he was. Even when he ought to look like hell, he didn’t – he just looked good. “You left Kurt behind,” he said, but the words had no real sting to them.
“You told me we had no choice.” I heard someone slam into the door behind me; muffled shouts came from outside.
“You didn’t argue.”
I blinked away a little excess lubrication of my eyelids. “You’re not Kurt.”
“I can’t keep up, Sienna,” he said, and he let his hand brush my cheek. “They’re gonna surround the house and come in, and we’ve got one gun to stop them with. You’re all metas.” He pointed to Andromeda, then Scott, who was just beyond the living room, standing on the white linoleum in the kitchen. “Our pursuers are human. You can outrun them, easy.”
“Probably not their helicopter, though,” Scott said, looking around. “Whatever we’re going to do, we need to do fast.”
“We run,” I said, not breaking my eyes off Zack.
“Attagirl,” he said with quiet resignation. “Buy time for the Directorate to get here. Do what you have to do.”
I felt the emotion rise. “I will.” I did it quick, so he wouldn’t see it – I raised my hand and clubbed him in the side of the head. Not too hard, but enough that his eyes rolled back. “Sorry,” I said as I lifted him onto my shoulders, careful not to touch his skin against mine. “No time for an argument.” I turned to Scott. “We go out the back and we run. If they want to come after us with a helicopter, we’ll find a big rock and take it out of the damned sky.”
“Sounds oddly familiar,” Scott said with an ironic smile, leading me out of the entry to the living room and into a kitchen in the back of the house. Andromeda followed us; if she had an opinion, she didn’t voice it, but she seemed to be taking everything in. The kitchen was white; linoleum, cabinets, countertops – the whole room felt bright, aided by a floor-to-ceiling sliding glass door that had the shades pulled back from it, the sun illuminating the room.
Sudden motion drew my eyes as Scott adjusted Reed on his shoulders and then lashed out with a kick to the kitchen table, sending it flying through the sliding glass door, breaking it to pieces as the table launched out and flattened two guys in black with submachine guns who had been easing up to it.
I heard the staccato sounds of gunfire pour into the windows on the sides and front of the house and I ran for the sliding glass door, only steps behind Scott. I scooped up one of the submachine guns from one of our fallen attackers, taking a second to stomp his head as I passed. I noticed Scott do the same and we both opened up with bursts of gunfire on the corners of the house as we ran, firing less for effect and more to drive the bastards following us into cover where they wouldn’t be able to shoot us – hopefully.
The backyard of the house went several hundred feet to the treeline of the woods behind it. To me it was an open question whether we’d even make it to the woods without getting hit. I vaulted over the cedar railing of the deck, Zack heavy on my shoulders. I heard Andromeda behind me and saw Scott go over as I landed. I ran, feet pounding against the grass. Another burst of gunfire caused me to zag, but it didn’t slow me. I turned and fired an offhand three-shot burst that forced a guy behind the corner of the house as I peppered the wall next to him with lead.
I fired another for good measure as I hit the treeline, but this one went wide; I was firing a submachine gun at long range and with one hand; even though I was stronger by far than a human, I wasn’t a miracle worker, and the gun kicked quite a bit. I heard bullets pepper the trees over my head, and branches snapped. One hit me in the side of the face as I passed. I veered behind a tree and fired again until the magazine ran dry. I flung the gun as I came over a slight rise and zagged behind another tree, altering my path to give me better cover. A look back confirmed it: I couldn’t see the house anymore, the trees allowing me to screen myself from their sight and line of fire.
We ran for minutes, outpacing our pursuers. I could not hear anyone other than Scott, puffing as he ran alongside me, following the natural veer of the landscape. I saw him, his face scratched and slightly bloody from where low-hanging branches had hit him as he passed. Andromeda made not a sound behind us, and I had to look back to make sure she was still there.
The woods were sparse, covered by a layer of dead pine needles, the underbrush not too thick here as we ran down, heading into a natural valley. I saw water in the distance, I thought, though it was hard to tell through the trees and the underbrush.
“Let’s go east for a while,” Scott said. “Unless there are any objections?”
“None here,” I said. “Every direction is the same to me – except for the one we just came from.” I looked back to Andromeda, who had stopped about twenty feet behind us, and was holding still, her tourist t-shirt the oddest contrast to her locks of sandy brown. Her face was perfect peace, a contradiction to the way I had met her, screaming, furious. “Andromeda?”
She was staring into the distance, beyond us, and I had started to slow to wait for her. “It doesn’t matter,” she said softly, and even across the distance between us I understood her words.
“It matters,” Scott said, having stopped himself, rebalancing Reed on his shoulder. “We need to get to cover, and find a way to dodge them for a while—”
“Irrelevant,” she said. Her eyes were locked on me, and I could see something behind them, something she almost seemed to want to say, but couldn’t find the words for.
“Andromeda?” I asked, uncertain. I had stopped, and could hear Scott’s breathing behind me. The wind was warm, a little drift of heat running across my face. The breath ran through me, and I could feel Zack’s weight on my shoulders, anchoring me to the earth.
“We need to keep moving,” Scott said, and I saw him looking around, as though our black-clad pursuers would descend at any moment.
“There is no escape. They have been waiting for this.” She seemed so certain, I didn’t feel it in me to argue, so I just listened to her. It felt as though all motion had stopped around us, like the woods had frozen, and the sounds of the crickets and birds had ceased, leaving a wall of silence around where we stood in the shade of the forest.
“No time for a defeatist attitude,” Scott said. “Let’s keep moving.”
A gunshot rang out, louder than the submachine guns we had been firing, clear and punctuating. Scott blanched and so did I. I saw Andromeda look down as she fell to her knees. A crimson stain spread outward from the center of her chest, a steady dribble of red running down the front of her white t-shirt. She hit her knees, then fell sideways.
“No,” I gasped, and ran to her, felt the rough ground beneath my knees as I landed next to her, dropping Zack without thought or ceremony. “Andromeda,” I said, touching her cool skin. I felt a prickle of activity; she had been only one of two people I’d ever met that I could touch without harming, and as my hand landed on her arm, I didn’t feel the usual draw of her soul through me, the way I did with others.
It felt…normal? “Andromeda,” I said again, cupping her face between my palms.
She let out a breath and coughed, a racking spasm that brought blood to her lips, little drops of it dotting her cheeks and chin, as it came out in a fine mist with every breath and settled on her pale face. She grabbed my arm, pulling me closer, then locked her hands on my face, staring into my eyes. “Remember me, Sienna Nealon,” she said, gasping for breath. “Know this…there is a traitor among you, in your Directorate.”