Page 45 of Crow’s Shadow

“AMBUSH. OUT. OUT.” Grim already has his door open, firing over it into the trees.

Crow’s hand slams into my chest, shoving me down into the footwell. “Stay low.”

“Crow.”

“Down, Shadow. Please.” And then he is out his door, gun up, moving.

Through the windshield I watch him work, and even here there is nothing wasted in it. He goes low along the ditch, using the trucks for cover. A shooter breaks from the trees to flank Buck, and Crow takes him off his feet without breaking stride. Rounds walk across the hood over my head, punching through the metal, the cab fills with the stink of cordite and hot steel.

“Byte, get off the road,” Grim roars into the radio. “You’re in the open.”

“I’m pinned. I can’t move.” Byte’s voice climbs high and thin. “Four on the high side. They’ve got the truck ranged and I can’t get the door open.”

“Then get in the footwell and stay there,” Grim shouts, and turns back to his own patch of trees.

Then a Ruin Ridge kid younger than me stands up to run for better cover. The slope takes him, three shots crack out. He goes down in the road and does not get up. Somewhere behind us Wolf is screaming a name into the dark.

I do not stay down. I come up enough to see through the shattered window, and it is bad, it is worse than bad. Three trucks stopped dead on a road with trees on both sides. Exactly where you never let yourself get trapped. The same lesson Grim drilled into me two birthdays ago. Renner did not set a fight. He set a killing box.

A Ruin Ridge brother spins and drops beside the lead truck, red blooming across his shoulder. Buck drags him behind a wheel by his collar. Storm is down on one knee at the ditch, firing in measured bursts, calling targets he cannot really see.

“They’re above us,” Storm shouts. “On the slope, dug in. We can’t climb up into it.”

“Then we cook in here,” Buck yells back.

They are right. We cook in here. Every second in the box is a coffin filling. Somewhere ahead in the smoke I can hear Crow doing the thing he does. There are too many guns on the slope and not enough of us, the fight is turning against us.

So, I stop being cargo.

I come up out of the footwell and out the door on the downhill side, into the ditch, into the noise, and the second my boots hit the dirt of Renner’s mountain, I feel them.

The dead. Not the men dying around me now. Older. Deeper. Women buried in shallow rows through these hills. A dozen of them, maybe more. Burned and buried on a mountain nobody comes back from because they wouldn’t give Renner what he wanted.

They feel me the instant I feel them, and they are not resting. They are fucking furious.

Their fury pours into me the way the cold poured up out of Maren’s grave, but there is no grief in this. Only twenty years of women who burned wanting one thing, which is to burn him back.

I have no words for what happens next, only the knowing it is not only mine. I go down into the place behind my breastbone, the one Ember taught me to open a thread at a time. I tear it wide. I do not reach for a candle or a puddle. I reach for the fuel, Renner’s own staging, the trucks his men drove up, the cans of gas, the dry August slope, all of it waiting, and behind me and under me a dozen dead women put their hands over mine and shove.

It leaves me the way a scream leaves a throat, all at once, more than I have, more than I own. Heat rips up my spine and out through my hands. The dead push it, and push it.

Fire tears up through the dug-in shooters. It catches the dry pines, jumps to a truck Renner’s men left in the trees, and the truck goes up in a fist of orange. Men who were killing us a breath ago come screaming out of the smoke, slapping at their own clothes, guns forgotten.

The killing box breaks.

Crow appears through the smoke twenty feet ahead and looks straight at me. “You?”

“Me.”

His mouth kicks at one corner. “Fuck me.”

Then he’s gone again.

“Up. Up. Push Through.” Crow’s voice cuts through the roar, loud and hard enough to move men. Grim and Buck and two of Wolf’s boys pour uphill through the gap my fire tore, through smoke and burning brush, over positions gone empty because the men who held them are running or down.

I watch Crow flicker as he goes, there and gone, a hole in the smoke, and the last two shooters die not knowing what took them. Grim reaches Byte’s truck and hauls him out by the collar, alive, gray-faced, still clutching the laptop to his chest.

We did it. Me and a dozen dead women nobody ever avenged.