Fine. She fucking well chose.
In the temporary reprieve Sloane cast about for a weapon. She’d lost the rifle at some point, and the knife. She thought of all those dead behind her, and the weapons they’d dropped. The krogan hadn’t come armed—not all of them, at least. Perhaps because there hadn’t been the supply, or the time, or maybe just because they wanted a challenge. She wondered if Tann knew what he’d ordered here, and whether Addison had been party to it. Kesh would never have agreed to this, though it would be just like Tann to go around her. Straight to the clan leader, waking her from her slumber and telling her just enough to get the desired result.
Salarian or not, it had worked.
There was a shoulder against hers. Calix. Their eyes met.
“Why’d you give me the knife?” she asked.
“To see what you’d do.” He forced a smile on to his face. “Enlightening how we act when we have no time to think, isn’t it? I guessed right, Sloane. I thought you might—”
A sharp report thundered across the barricades. Calix’s brains left his body in a small gray eruption to the left. His eyes went unnaturally wide. He dropped to his knees and slumped against her.
Sloane turned, dumbstruck. The krogan were coming again. A wave of them, bearing down on the exhausted rebel line. But they did not carry rifles. She saw others, then, at the smashed barricade where it had all begun. Newcomers in uniforms like hers. One of them was lowering a sniper rifle from her shoulder, having seen Sloane in her sight, the target she would have shot next after Calix. One of her officers. Their eyes met, for an instant, and then the woman was gone, rushing back to report what she’d seen.
Sloane is with them, she’d say. Gone over. Or maybe she’s been working against us all along.
As the enraged horde of krogan fell upon the rebels Sloane sank to her knees. She turned Calix over and looked into his clever eyes one last time. It was all she could take. The last straw.
This wasn’t what she came here for.
This wasn’t how it was supposed to be.
“What do we do?” someone asked.
After a second Sloane realized that the question had been directed at her. She glanced up and saw the brute, Reg. The one who’d savagely bound her wrists, the one whose “approval rating” of her had been rock bottom, according to Calix.
“What?” she asked, numbly.
“What do we do?” he repeated. He was asking her. Just like that. With Calix gone, this rabble was leaderless, and they knew it.
“We die,” Sloane said, simply. “They won’t stop until we’re all dead.”
The brute offered her a hand. “Then we die fighting,” he said.
Sloane took his hand. A rifle was thrust toward her. She looked at it as if it was a foreign thing, despite the fact she could take it apart and reassemble it while blindfolded. She took it.
“Some other time,” Sloane said. “Let’s die on our terms. For now I say we retreat, deeper into the Nexus. Go underground.”
He puffed up. A wall of a person. “I’m willing to die here.”
“Are you willing to let your cause die here, as well?”
That gave him pause.
“What about family?” she demanded. “Friends? What about making a fucking choice that matters?”
Reg looked up. His eyes closed. Then, with a grunt, he nodded. “Emory’d never forgive me if I lost my head here.”
The battle closed in around them. Sloane clapped him on the shoulder. “Good. Then let’s make this one matter, okay? For Calix.”
A single, grudging nod.
“Retreat!” Sloane shouted, and she was off, moving away from Morda, deeper into the idle machines of the assembly floor. She repeated the call over and over, and Reg did the same. They joined up with a group of rebels near the back, armed with longer-range rifles, led by someone named Nnebron. He took aim at Sloane as she rushed up, but Reg stepped between.
“She’s with us now,” Reg said. Something in his voice convinced the others. Trust. In him, not her.
They backed across the room, covering one another, firing indiscriminately into the horde that followed. Sloane tried to ignore the screams, those who hadn’t managed to back out fast enough and found themselves inside the storm of krogan wrath.
Sloane let Reg take point. He seemed to know the way. Perhaps he’d scouted this room for Calix, helped map its secrets and exits. Or maybe he was just as blind as the rest of them.
A thunderous explosion came from somewhere across the way. For an instant the far wall became lit with the silhouette of battle.
Ahead lay a door. Reg turned and leaned toward it and knocked a shelving unit full of spare parts out of his path. Sloane skirted sideways around the mess and heard someone behind her slip and go down. Or maybe the sniper had got them. Too hard to tell now.
Reg was five meters from the door when it exploded inward. Shrapnel splattered across his body. He dropped, a lifeless sack, and skidded across the final few meters into a cloud of smoke and debris.
Sloane tried to stop, but those behind her pressed. They’d rather face the unknown than the krogan at their backs. She saw Nnebron at her side now, others behind him. All eyes were on the door as they continued to rush toward it, rifles coming back around to the front.
“Enough!” a voice shouted.
The one voice in the entire station that could make everyone in the room stop and take notice. Nakmor Kesh pushed through the smoke. Behind her, Sloane saw familiar faces. Her security team, or some of them at least. And she saw the accusation in their eyes, the disbelief, the growing hatred.
“Enough,” Kesh repeated, this time for Sloane specifically, all bile and disappointment. In response she held up her hands, letting her rifle clatter to the floor. Those around her were less willing, but somehow she’d become their leader and, after a tense few seconds, they did as she did.
Nnebron was last, and he stared at her as he let his weapon slip from his fingers. His gaze held equal parts accusation and resentment, as if to say, This is all your fault.
Sloane Kelly laughed, then, though no one else seemed to get the joke. Somehow she’d become both the reason for their rebellion, and its de facto leader. A failed one.
Isn’t that just perfect.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
All the fire drained out of their hundreds the moment their leader fell. Even if they hadn’t stopped fighting, even if they’d pushed harder, desperate to the end, it wouldn’t matter. Calix was the heart of them. And the opponent, well, few could be more terrifying.
Hope had turned to fear, and that fear had fueled a revolution they thought they couldn’t lose. Sloane recognized that. She understood it. Felt the twist in her chest when Calix’s brain and blood had sprayed.
That didn’t mean she was going to be anyone’s punching bag.
Lawrence Nnebron was a man on the edge—wiry, angry, and unwilling to let anything go. The moment Sloane entered the crowded cell, he came at her like a man with nothing left to lose, his lips peeled back in a twisted snarl and murder in his eyes.
As she sidestepped his swing, caught his wrist and spun him around, that look turned to something much younger. Much less sure.
Soul-deep loss. Of friends. Of self.
Of his place in the universe.
The paneling clanged loudly as she rammed him against it, pinning his head to the wall and tucking his wrist high enough up his back that he’d regret moving. He cried out, echoed by the other seven rebels in the cell. Just one cell of many, and all down the hall Sloane heard the arguments, the blame, and the anguish of loss.
“Stay put,” Sloane demanded.