Page 17 of Alien Burn

Dhomhes stayed down. Around him, debris rattled across the decking, and for several breaths all he could hear was a thin, high whine.

He tried his comm. His thumb slipped on the control.

Blood. His palm was bleeding.

He wiped it on his robes and tried again.

“Stron.”

No answer.

He pushed himself up, blinked dust out of his eyes, and searched where the ramp had been.

The upper end of the ramp was gone. He searched the people moving beyond it for a gray dress, a dark head turning toward him. Nothing stayed still long enough to count. He passed the nearest guard an order to clear the terrace stairs and kept looking.

A raised lattice of armor moved near the wreckage. Stron rolled onto one side with the red-haired woman held against him. She was moving. Pushing at him, by the look of it.

Dhomhes let his head hang for one breath.

Then he stood.

By the time his hearing began to return properly, Stron had the guards clearing a route to the banquet hall.

Dhomhes took the far end. He helped carry two injured women across the terrace, went back for a third, and found himself holding a stranger's hand while a medic worked beneath a blanket.

“My sister,” the woman kept saying. “She was right there.”

“Tell me her name.”

She did. He passed it to a staff member with a data pad.

He could do that much.

Near the hall entrance, a dark-haired volunteer stood beside an overturned serving cart. She was trying to get another woman to sit on an empty crate. The woman resisted, staring back toward the platform.

“Just for a moment,” the dark-haired one said. “Your leg is bleeding.”

The same female who had been beside Roemary at the top of the ramp. Gray dress. Blood drying across her knuckles. Alive.

Relief loosened his chest so abruptly that he had to stop beside the cart. His armor pressed against his sleeves again.

It had done that before the blast, when she looked down the ramp at him. Heat had struck through his chest, sharp enough to catch his breath. His feet had turned toward her before he thought to move. Even now, with her alive in front of him, his body strained to close the distance.

Shock could account for a great deal now. He held to that explanation while the injured woman finally sat.

“A medic is coming,” he told them.

The woman in gray nodded. Her eyes went past him to the doorway, then toward the terrace stairs. She shifted the crate slightly, bringing her companion farther out of the path of the incoming carts.

Practical. He might have asked her to keep helping, but a guard caught his attention.

“We have a terrain crew. They're assembling below the east access.”

Dhomhes turned at once.

He went to the east access, where three members of the terrain crew were unloading equipment. One had a live image from a drone spread above her wrist. Dhomhes bent over it, searching for anything he could recognize beneath the smoke.

“Can you get to them?”