“Kenji—”
“I know. We’ll figure it out. Don’t worry, brother. Kiko won’t be breathing for too long.”
We went down the hall and stopped at the sight in front of us.
No.
A pregnant lab tech was dead on her side near the records cart.
Her bloodied belly rose under the torn scrub top. A knife had been stuck in the soft round curve.
I shivered.
Nao. Sora’s wife.
Her one good arm was still flung forward across the tile as though she had been crawling toward the reception desk when she had finally stopped crawling. The other arm hung wrong at the shoulder, twisted under her in a way that no living body would have allowed.
A long red snail-trail stretched behind her across the floor.
She had made it almost halfway to the desk.
Almost.
A pressure rose behind my ribs that I did not have time to name.
I turned to Hiro. “Let’s go.”
Hiro didn’t move. He just stood there with his lips parted and his face crumbling.
“Come on.” I grabbed his arm and pulled him forward, but. . .I knew that a small part of my brother still remained right there next to Nao.
We left the lobby and turned the corner.
Three Scales stood at the far end of the hall with guns out and pointed our way.
What the fuck? Are they crazy?
They didn’t shoot just yet, which told me they weren’t that crazy. They knew who the fuck stood in front of them and that Hiro and I were not that easy to kill.
A rolling hospital bed sat halfway down the corridor between us and the wall of armed Scales.
An old man lay on his back across the mattress with an IV line still taped to his arm and a hospital gown half-twisted across his chest. His mouth was open and his eyes too. A red bloom soaked the front of the gown where a single round had punched through him at close range.
The wheels of the bed were unlocked. The whole thing had been rolled into the hallway and abandoned mid-evacuation.
One of the traitorous Scales barked out, “The Dragon’s here!”
Then five more entered from another corner. I thought that would be it, but apparently Kiko had been busy on the island, entering my weaker Scales’ heads.
The count climbed past anything that made sense in a single corridor of a single clinic on a single night.
Ten.
Twelve.
Sixteen traitors.
And I knew that because of that. . .sixteen widows would burn in the morning turning to ash while sixteen pairs of parents melted alongside them.
