I slash my knife across the back of the leg. Just at the back of the ankle.
Right across the tendon.
The man goes down immediately, his right leg made useless by my blade. I feel the spray of water as he hits it along with a loud cry of pain and surprise. It echoes through the tunnel and deep into my ears.
There’s a second spray, a second cry, a loud grunt, then a sharp crack. I know that last sound. That’s my ASP doing what it does best: laying the dead down.
There’s silence after that. I know I’m breathing harsh and rapid, but I can’t hear it. Or else it’s so loud and constant it’s a white noise and it’s all I hear. Either way, I’m waiting. I want him to speak, to tell me he’s alive. To reassure me I didn’t help kill the wrong man. That I’m not about to be next.
“Kitten.”
I leap for the sound. I stow my knife so I don’t slice him in my rush, but then I throw myself against him. His arms go around me and it’s the hug I wanted to give him when I first saw him back inside the Colony. It’s easier here in the dark with no one watching, no one wondering, no one assuming. When it’s just Vin and I, and we know what we are and what we aren’t. What we are right now is alive. Alive and very, very lucky.
“You okay?” he asks, his voice close to my ear.
I nod. “Yeah.”
“You’re shaking.”
He’s right—I’m trembling from head to toe and it’s not from the cold. It’s from reality. It comes from knowing Vin and I just killed again. We didn’t put a Risen down. We killed a person. Yeah, it was in self-defense, but you can tell yourself that all day long but in the end it is what it is: murder.
Vin insists I’ll get used to it. Ryan says I never will. Based on how I feel right now, I’m starting to side with Ryan.
“I’m fine,” I lie. “You?”
“I’ll be all right.”
I pull back to try to look at him. His voice is getting clearer, but also rougher. I can hear him better now and what I hear is pain.
“What did he do to you?”
Vin clears his throat. “He got ahold of me. Nearly choked me out. That boy was strong.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Why? I’m counting myself lucky he didn’t take a bite out of me.”
“I’m really sorry.”
“What the hell are you sorry for?”
“I don’t know. I never should have let him get his hands on you.”
Vin chuckles, his voice sounding strained. “I was thinking the same thing about you, Kitten. Don’t be sorry, you did plenty. How did you manage to take him down?”
“I cut his Achilles heel.”
“Damn,” he coughs.
“Yeah.”
“Wait, he and I were wrestling blind. How did you know you weren’t cutting my leg?”
I step away from him slowly.
He grabs my hand. “Kitten.”
“I was pretty sure I had his leg,” I admit.
“Pretty sure?”
I shake my hand free of his grasp. “Are you still standing? Did I cut your leg?”
“No. But—”
“Then calm down! We have to get out of here. He’s not the only wolf in these woods.”
I hear Vin’s feet splashing away from me in the water.
“Where are you going?” I cry, anxious and annoyed that he’s leaving me behind.
“I’m looking for the torch he had.”
“He tossed it in the water. It’s useless.”
“I doubt it.” I can hear him sloshing around, his hands probably dragging through the water. “These tunnels are full of moisture. They have to be burning something that can stand up to that.”
“What are you going to light it with if you find it?”
“I just found it. And we’re going to use whatever he has on him.”
“I’m not searching him,” I say immediately. “What if he isn’t dead?”
Vin chuckles again. “Oh, he’s dead. Here’s your ASP back, by the way. You might want to clean it while it’s still dark.”
I reach out, my fingers immediately connecting with his arm. I trace it down to my ASP which I snap out to length and swish around in the water at my feet.
“I’m not going anywhere near him.”
“One of us has to.”
“Be my guest,” I mutter, stowing my weapon.
“I just did all the work,” he snaps at me.
“Did you? Really? All of it?”
“Search him.”
“I have flint,” I snap back, reaching into my back pocket.
“Are you kidding me?”
“No. Who goes anywhere these days without it?”
“It’s everywhere you want to be,” Vin grumbles, pulling the flint from my hand.
“What?”
“Nothing. Before your time.”
“You’re not that much older than I am.”
The flint sparks, the torch instantly catching fire in a sputtering blaze between us. The light ignites Vin’s face, casting shadows over his skin, under his eyes, at the corners of his mouth. He looks it then—older than me. His skin has seen more sun, his mouth has formed more frowns. But it’s his eyes that show it the most. They’re hard like glass.
It makes me wonder what mine look like.
“I’ve got ten years and a lot of lives on you,” Vin tells me quietly, his voice still gruff from his fight with Bryan. “Even if we were the same age, I’d still be older than you.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
He smiles wryly. “Just because you don’t get it doesn’t mean it doesn’t make sense. Now come on. I want to get out of these tunnels.”
I follow closely behind him as he takes us back the way Bryan came. I hope it’s the way out. For all we know it could be leading us deeper inside this underground maze, maybe guiding us into Bryan’s secret lair where he kept snacks locked up just in case. I’m worried every time we round a bend that we’ll run smack into another cannibal or a cave of horrors, but I’m equally anxious to run into Ryan. I know he told me to run to Crenshaw, to leave him behind, but I don’t know if I can. He has to be down here. I refuse to believe he was taken by Marlow’s men. The explosion went off, he and Andy got the job done. But did they do it in time or was it a last resort—an effort made to save the rest of us that cost them both their lives?
It’s exactly the kind of self-sacrificial, heroic bullshit Ryan would pull.
“We’re out,” Vin says.
Up ahead there’s light shining down from a manhole. It’s faint—just a few pinpoints coming through the holes in the steel disc—but it means the outside world.
“Hopefully we can open it.”
Vin nods in the growing light. “They seal some of them.”
“It’s to keep people like you out.”
“You mean people like us.”
“No, I mean you,” I correct him. “People like you and everyone in The Hive.”
“Sounding kind of judgmental there, Kitten. You got something you want to say?”
“Babies.”
Vin stops, taking my arm to stop me as well. When I meet his stare, it’s angry but controlled. “Do you know what it’s like for a kid to grow up in The Hive? Any clue?”
“No. But I know what it’s like to grow up without a mom,” I reply hotly.
He releases my arm, his face disgusted. “Oh boo hoo. We all know what that’s like. Trust me, it’s better to grow up without a mom in a Colony than it is to grow up with one in The Hive. If it’s a girl, she’ll end up right where her mom is. If it’s a boy, he’ll probably end up dead by the time he’s nine and either one of them could end up hooked on Honey, tweekin’ and itching for a fix all day every day. It’s an ugly place to live if you don’t know how to do it right so, yeah, I think those kids are better off getting out.”