I could hear the approaching sirens of first responders. They would be too late.
The ground was littered with the dead. Not just ferals. Guards. Techs. People who had been alive minutes ago.
I grabbed Jess by the arm and ran toward the ward where Ash had vanished. The building had crumpled like a tin can, its walls peeled back, its insides exposed.
As I got closer, I saw a white helicopter emerge from the trees beyond the perimeter.
For a moment, I spotted Marr standing in the doorway.
“Fuck.”
He was getting away.
And Ash was nowhere in sight.
“Fuck! Ash!” I shouted, scrambling over the rubble, tearing at broken concrete and twisted metal. “Where are you?”
Black vans were already pulling up around us. Men and women spilled out, rifles raised, moving with practised precision. Guards were rounded up and bound. Students were already being led to waiting buses, to be taken out of the area.
Probably to another holding cell.
I watched Miranda Wild run out to a waiting silver BMW and take off through the chaos.
For a moment I met her eyes. She sneered and ducked into her car. It sped through the gunfire in a squeal of tires, before disappearing off down the road.
She was abandoning the school.
Goddamn coward.
Good fucking riddance.
A Black Hawk descended nearby, rotors thundering overhead. The wind from the rotors was deafening.
When it landed, a familiar figure stepped out.
He was older—forties, maybe. Greying at the temples, solid, composed. His soldiers fanned out around him without a word.
Elliot Muir.
He spotted me immediately and hurried over. “Dev?”
“Ash was here,” I muttered, barely looking at him as I shifted rubble. “He went into the ward.”
Elliot’s expression hardened instantly. He nodded once.
“Start digging,” he ordered. “All of you.”
The soldiers moved without hesitation, tearing into the ruins with ruthless efficiency.
Elliot’s hand closed briefly around my arm. Firm. Grounding.
“We’ll find him, Dev.”
“Elliot!”
K’s voice cut across the courtyard.
Elliot straightened and turned. Across the wreckage, K and the Phantom stood with Gideon between them, guns trained on his chest.
