Page 337 of Immune

“No,” he says.

Fletcher rises from beside the hatch, shoulders slightly hunched, hands clenched tightly, and blood dripping from his mouth. “Maine—”

“No.” Maine steps back once, shaking his head. “Where’s my sister?”

The bond yanks south against my ribs again, weak and covered and wrong. I look down at the hatch like it’s the worst thing the world ever invented after the Biters.

Maine catches me looking, and his eyes fall down to it, too. I catch the exact moment he understands what words aren’t telling him. It’s then that his question is answered and his heart splits in two right in his chest for all to see.

He moves so fast the moment the lightbulb goes off above his head. He rushes toward the hatch and slams against it with the butt of the shotgun.

Once.

Twice.

“Come on!” he roars. “Open the fucking thing!”

The shotgun rings against the metal with a rattling clang. Again. And again. And again. And then Fletcher catches it before Maine can swing a fifth time.

Maine turns on him with murder in his eyes and a snarl on his lips. “Let go.”

“No.”

“She’s down there!”

“I know.”

“Then fucking move!”

Fletcher doesn’t move. Not even an inch. “You crack the hinge wrong, you jam it shut for good. You want that?”

Maine’s face crumples like wet tissue paper and I can relate to the feelings flooding through him. If I didn’t have blinding rage and panic racing through every inch of my body, I’m pretty sure I’d fucking fall apart like that, too.

It only lasts for half a second, though. Long enough to show the boy who lost his sister once and then just watched the world take her again. Then it is gone, buried under a similar rage that’s simmering under my skin just waiting to burst free.

“I am not losing her again,” he says, his words coming out like more of a warning than a statement.

“No,” I tell him, and he looks at me. I wipe blood from my blade, using the body of a Biter as a cleaning rag, and add, “You’re not going to lose her.”

Valeria’s gaze moves from Maine to me. “Kaito—”

“Dakota is alive,” I tell them quietly, my voice carrying now that there aren’t explosions going off and Biters are crawling into the compound, and we aren’t being raided by assholes who have taken the only thing that matters to me in this world. “Dakota is close. We are going now.”

“We don’t know where that hatch leads,” Valeria argues, though it’s a weak argument. Pretty sure she’s already fully aware that we’re going even if the hatch leads us to the fiery pits of hell.

“Then we find out,” I tell her seriously.

“We need a plan.”

“I already have one.”

Ewan laughs once but it’s completely humorless. It’s like cracked glass, splintered and completely wrecked.

“By chance, could this plan contain murder?” he asks roughly.

“Mhm,” I answer with a false sense of nonchalance while I wrangle my rage into a tight ball I have to grip with both hands.

“Beautiful. Sign me up,” he says.