Every muzzle flash turned the world white. I blinked at afterimages while the next man already closed the gap. The rifle kicked hard against my shoulder, and the stone walls threw it all back. The kid from the gully, the one who'd fired first, crouched three positions down and worked his rifle like he owed something. Maybe he did. He reloaded cleanly and put a Myrmidon down when the man cleared the barricade. I let him be. We needed every gun, and penance was his business.
Between volleys, I turned my head toward the deeper tunnels. The katana hadn't sung in too long. I tightened my grip on the rifle stock until the knuckles ached, the same ache I'd carried in my grandmother's kitchen doorway when I'd wanted to cross the room and put my hands on Jasper and couldn't.
Alonzo's voice crackled over the radio, calm as a man ordering coffee. "North corridor. We're funneling them into the overhangs. They're falling apart."
"East corridor holding," Valentina reported. "Two down on their side. We're good."
A section of the ceiling came down in the main corridor. Dust billowed out and choked me. Rock blocked the passage where the lead squad had pushed through. They were cut off, trapped between us and rubble, and Beni's people shredded them from three directions before they could regroup.
Below me, Valentina's fighters threaded through the drainage channels between positions. My abuela would have lost her mind if she'd known her grandniece crawled through a sewer with a rifle. Valentina would have told her to take it up with God.
A body hit the ground beside me. Mateo. Half his face was gone. He'd brought me coffee yesterday, black, no sugar, and he'd said something about his daughter's birthday next week. He'd sat in my grandmother's root cellar and gripped his kneewhile the Kris decided whether to join this fight, and he'd voted yes because Lença voted yes and Mateo always followed courage when he found it.
I kept moving.
Jasper's katana sang from somewhere deeper in the tunnels. That whistle of steel cutting air carried through stone the way gunfire couldn't, clean and singular. I tracked him without seeing him, one part of my brain on the corridor in front of me and the rest on the man I loved working somewhere in the dark. Every time the blade went silent, my stomach dropped. Every time it sang again, I could breathe.
Valentina's voice came over the radio. "They're pulling back from the east."
"North approach secure," Alonzo reported.
The shooting in my section thinned and died. I had blood on my hands, stone dust in my throat, and my whole back had locked tight enough to snap.
The fight had moved deeper. The sound changed into something wilder, more personal. Steel on steel carried from the main corridors, and underneath it a voice that screamed without words.
Achilles was here.
I stepped over bodies from both sides, reloading as I went. I stopped looking at faces because every face belonged to someone I could not carry right now.
I turned the corner and everything stopped.
Bodies lay everywhere. Achilles stood in the middle of it with Patroklos's chain sickle in one hand and a Greek sword in the other. Both dripped red. He fought like he'd already decided to die.
He locked onto me with recognition first. Then rage.
"You." The word tore out of him. "You're the one. You killed him."
He came at me. I squeezed off two shots, and both hit center mass. Body armor ate them. He staggered and kept coming. The sword came at my face, and I threw myself sideways, hit stone hard enough to tear through my shirt, rolled and came up firing.
He closed on me before the second round cleared the barrel. Too close for the gun to matter. He knocked it aside with the flat of the blade, and the sword came down. I jammed my rifle up to block, and the impact rattled every bone in my arms. He ripped the rifle away like I were a child holding a stick.
Mierda. This was how I died. In a tunnel, disarmed, with a Greek demigod swinging his dead lover's weapons at my head.
The katana caught the blade mid-thrust, inches from my chest. Jasper stood between us, locked into that cold operator mode I'd seen twice before and hoped I'd never see again.
"Diego. Move."
I scrambled back and went for the pistol at my hip.
Achilles and Jasper circled each other, katana versus sword and chain sickle. I raised the pistol, and they moved too fast, too tangled. If I pulled the trigger, I be as likely to hit Jasper as Achilles. I shifted left. The angle stayed bad. I shifted right. Worse.
I stood there with a loaded gun and nothing I could do with it, and the man I'd spent every night of the last month memorizing fought for his life three meters away.
My abuela told me once that the worst thing about loving a fighter was the watching. She'd said it about my grandfather, who came home from jobs with blood on his knuckles and stories he'd never tell. She'd sit at the kitchen table and wait, and the waiting was the thing that ate her alive. I'd thought she was being dramatic. I owed her an apology.
Jasper gave ground, step by step. Achilles pressed forward with the sword, driving him back. Each strike landed like he meant to cut through Jasper and into the earth beneath him, andJasper absorbed every one, redirected, gave another step. But Achilles had nothing to lose.
The sword caught Jasper's shoulder. He twisted, but not fast enough. Blood spread through his shirt, and the air left my chest.
