“I’m Eos.”
Apparently, I made a joke, as her harsh laughter devolves into genuine chuckles. “If that’s your real name, I feel bad for you.”
I roll my eyes. “It is real enough for you. Get on your knees with your hands behind your head. I am calling a medic for my soldiers and we will take you into custody. Are you alone?”
Captain Finley clasps her hands behind her head and kneels down in the grass. “Is that a proposition?”
You wish, she says in my head. That would work for Lucy, with her beauty and accompanying confidence, but not for me. “It is not.”
She clicks her tongue. “That’s a shame.”
“Captain Finley, are you alone?”
“Ah, sure.”
I narrow my eyes. “That is not a yes or a no.”
“You’re right, it’s not.”
Pain radiates across my head as I’m smacked with what I think is the butt of a gun. I’m forced to my knees, a knife swiftly held to my throat, barely nicking the skin. “Move and we’ll kill your friends.”
Out of my periphery, a rebel with a gun in each hand has them both aimed at Cassie and Mason’s unconscious bodies. So sloppy, letting a miscreant to sneak up on me. I am rusty.
But not that rusty.
My assailant gets an elbow in the groin, then I reach back and grab him by the hips, and use as much strength as I can to roll him over my back and into the person holding the gun on Frank. Slipping his pistol from him, I also grab Frank’s gun from her hand and get to my feet, holding both sets of soldiersat gunpoint. They brandish guns on me, and we stand at a stalemate.
“Holy shit, that was impressive.” Captain Finley holsters her pistol. “All right, look, the boss didn’t tell us there’d be Greens on this train.”
“You thought a ten-car-long supply train would do interstate travel without a guard?” It did, of course, but it is a reckless assumption to make. “Not a very bright ‘boss’ you have, though I suppose that is to be expected.”
Captain Finley smirks, both predatory and inviting at once. “Down, kitty. Usually there’s only a couple rookies traveling up front. Most of them scatter like roaches and then we take what’s left. But you’re no roach, are you?”
A short wave of nausea hits me as the pain in my body rages against my resolve to keep standing. “Look, I need a medic for my soldiers. I don’t want to kill all of you for no reason.”
“Cocky bitch,” one of the men says.
Sighing, I will away the burning pain in my palms and focus. Quick-firing twice, both soldiers find themselves unarmed, with their guns shot out of their hands. “Not cocky.”
“Is anyone else turned on?” Captain Finley looks around. “Just me?”
I roll my eyes. “Seeing as how your amateurish effort to derail the train resulted in the destruction of the entire supply and possibly started an ecosystem-disrupting forest fire?—”
“Excessively critical, but not untrue. Numb-nuts over there got heavy-handed with the dynamite.”
“—I see two choices here: either I kill you, then call for a medic, or I let you leave, and I call for a medic. Which would you prefer?”
Captain Finley smirks and laces the hands she’s had up behind her neck. “It is a damn shame about the side you’re on,Greenie. I like your spunk.” She gestures to the others. “Let’s go. See you later, gorgeous.”
With their tails between their legs, she and the other soldiers scamper off into the woods. I wait for two minutes with my guns ready in case it’s a feint, then use my watch to call the nearest Order outpost for a medic and backup. Exhausted, I kneel in the grass and try to block out the pain radiating through my body.
An unseen assailant throws a bag over my head from behind. I struggle, but my kneeling position puts me at a disadvantage. Before I can gain leverage, there is a sharp pain in my neck. Within seconds, the drug races through my bloodstream and renders me unconscious.
When I awaken,I’m no longer in a field. Sluggish and disoriented, I struggle to place myself in my surroundings. I’m dressed, but it appears whoever dressed me also wrapped chains around my wrists and bound me to a bed in an unknown room. It’s a large room with one wall full of windows letting in a diagonal stream of light across a tile floor. The view is a picturesque blue sky and the tops of trees, so I must be on the second or third level of this building.
Arranged in neat rows sit several other beds on simple metal frames—all of them thin, white mattresses but none of them have chains on them. Some kind of medical room, I guess, or a triage.
Evidently, I have been captured. What a truly annoying turn of events.
