The cries of buzzards grow more plentiful, their throaty delight at dead meat sending a shiver through me as the sun starts to sink and the sky grows red.
We pass half a house, the roof caved in, the walls blown apart, the flower garden blooming on one side, but the other half is a giant divot of ugly dirt—probably the work of a missile.
My throat dries as my imagination plays out the attack in vivid detail. A family, just going about their day…father in the fields, mother feeding chickens, two kids running to the tree line to play hide-and-seek?—
WHOOOMP.
My hands fly out, grabbing onto the metal rail in front of me, and my eyes go wide as the bus shudders. My guard shoots to his feet and is in the aisle, gun drawn, facing the rear of the bus in less than a second.
What is he doing?
Didn’t we just hit a pothole?
Dread pockmarks my bones when the massive thumping sound is followed by the very familiarrat-tat-tatof machine-gun fire.
Unlike the practice shooting ranges at Eros, this sound feels very real.
Blood rushes up my cheeks, and my face is suddenly lava hot as I whirl in my seat to look behind us. A soldier screams, the noise akin to a dying rabbit—serrating my eardrums and making bile rush up the back of my throat. He slumps as one guy scrambles to help his friend, and the other men duck down behind their seats for cover.
“Get down, Majesty!” Mario shoves at me just as a green, open-air jeep comes barreling out from behind the shattered farmhouse.
Two men dressed in black, except for the dragon insignia of Nóthos on their arm bands, stand at machine guns mounted onto the top rail, and their belt magazines flop as the vehicle jolts over a rock.
Seconds later, they bombard the side of the bus with a spray of bullets that sounds like a hailstorm and sends tremors rocketing through my muscles.
The bus must be constructed of sturdier stuff than I thought because the rounds don’t immediately turn the sides into lace, just dimple the inner walls.
But I exchange a look with one of the other recruits, whose face is as ghastly white as mine feels.
There’s the rev of an engine and the screech of tires behind us, and I peek up over the bottom edge of the window just in time to see my security detail's black car veer off the road toward the jeep. A back window rolls down, and a rifle emerges.
My detail shoots at the jeep.
A roar erupts from the recruits behind me, and the bus fills with the feral, spicy stench of alpha fury, a thick, pungent smell like a locker room.
“FUCKING GET THEM!”
“LET’S GO!”
The cheers sound more like football game fanfare than war-appropriate sentiments. But I’ve never been to war before, so what do I know?
My mind races as I try to decide if Teddie would cheer with them or if he’d be more reserved. But I can’t decide. Can’t playthe role when panic churns every thought I have to meaningless static.
“Shit!” someone shouts.
I glance outside again.
Suddenly the dark car lurches, and it feels like it takes my stomach with it. As the car tilts, it’s as if the world has slowed to a crawl. The front end tips down and smashes into a ditch that was hidden behind some tall grass, and the impact smashes my teeth together, my heartbeat throbbing painfully.
Before the Hypso alphas can emerge from the car wreck, one of the assholes in the jeep has a rocket launcher out. The bulky silhouette over the man’s shoulder is instantly recognizable from all my classes but is also somehow utterly unreal.
My brain glitches and can’t seem to process the fact that I’m staring at it. That this is actually happening.
I've barely blinked before the entire car seems to explode at once in an orange blast that makes my kitchen fireball resemble a matchstick flame. The conflagration engulfs the car in under a second, then stretches thirty feet into the sky, wild and flickering. Spitting sparks.
Horrified, I smack my palm over my mouth.
There's no way they've survived?—
