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“We can carry him…” my sister says.
But we both know we can’t. We wouldn’t make it twenty meters dragging him and the children. I look at the terrified children, then at my sister.
“Children,” I say hollowly, “come kiss Dada for luck.”
Ava understands. Her calm cracks. In the tears, I see the scared little girl who wept in her bed when our mother passed. The one I’d have to sing to sleep even though she was older.
“I don’t want to leave Dada,” Conn cries.
“I’ll bring him,” I say. “You all just have to go on ahead. Now kiss him.” Believing me, the children rush to kiss my father on the cheek. His eyes brim with tears as they dart back and forth. My sister bends and kisses him on the brow. She stays there, trembling, before stumbling back. Conn holds on to him, not letting go till his mother rips him violently away and moves them toward the door. “The north watchtower,” she says. “Be there soon.”
“I will.”
“Lyria.”
“Yes?”
“Bring me my boy.” We hold each other’s hands, a life full of wedding skirts, births, and love reduced now to a single second of fear. And then our hands are parting and the door closes and she’s swallowed by the nightmare outside. Through a crack in the plastic, I watch her run, clutching Ella to her breast and dragging her two boys along into the dark. I stay behind with my father in the hut, listening to the world ending beyond the thin walls. Some part of me thinks that if we stay here, the storm will pass us by. The plastic will somehow keep the Red Hand and their guns and slingBlades out. I want to tell Da it will be well. That I’ll see him soon. It’s the most present he’s been in a year, looking at me, knowing this is the last time he’ll see me. I kneel so that we are eye to eye, and clutch his face in my hands. This is the man who tucked me in at night. Who would sit me on his knee at Laureltide and tell stories of mining glories and pitvipers and fights. He was as vast as the sky itself. But now, he is a broken man watching helplessly as the world swallows his children.
“I will see you in the Vale,” I whisper to him, our foreheads together. “I love you. I love you. I love you.” Then I throw myself away from him. In three steps I am out the door.
Leaving him behind is like tearing a part of my body away.
My eyes sting with tears, but a cold clarity fills me. I have to get Liam. My sister is already gone. The camp’s given over to madness. Gammas fleeing their houses. Flames in the distance. Two ships roar overhead through the black sky. The rattling of automatic guns, and the occasional whine of an energy weapon. Screams careen in from everywhere, swirling and swarming around me. I sprint diagonal between the homes, weaving my way through Gamma township to the central infirmary. I collide with a man full on and spin down into the mud, taking his elbow to my face. It barely jars him. He stumbles back, carrying a child, then rushes on. I know him. Elrow, one of my father’s headTalks from years back. He doesn’t even look down at me.
Struggling back to my feet, I find the infirmary with its door locked. A peaked white plastic building stained on its fringes by mud. Waiting there in the rain like a girl in a white dress. I hammer on the doors. “Let me in! It’s Lyria. Let me in!” I kick the doors twice before they unlock from the inside and open. Three men and a woman stand in their yellow nursing livery, holding heavy medical instruments intended for my skull. I hold up my hands.
“Lyria!” Janis, a Yellow doctor and head of the infirmary, shouts. “Let her through!”
“Janis, where’s Liam?”
“In the back.” Janis guides me through rows of cots filled with terrified children and infirm patients till we reach my nephew in the back. He’s sitting in his bed with his hands wrapped around his legs, sightless and listening to the horror outside. “What’s going on out there?” Janis asks.
“Red Hand,” I say. “Dropships and trucks.”
“They’re here?” she asks. She can’t believe it. “But the Republic…”
“Damn the Republic,” I say. “We’ve got to run. Liam…” I wrap my arms around the little boy. He’s so thin he could be made of glass. His hair’s an unruly explosion of red, like mine, but more closely cropped, and his mannerisms are all hesitant, like a boy asking a girl to dance at Laureltide. I kiss him on his head and wrap him snug in the little blue jumper I brought for him. I pull the hood up on his head so his little pale face is all that peeks out of it. “It’s well. It’s well. I’ve got you.”
“Where’s Mum?” he asks in a small voice.
“Waiting for us. But you have to come with me.”
“Is she all right?” he asks.
“I need you to be brave. Can you do that? Can you be like the Goblin? When he followed the Reaper to the Dragonmaw? Can you do that for me?”
“Yes,” he says, nodding his little head. “I can.” I heft him from the bed and move to the door. Janis blocks my way.
“It’ll be safer here,” she says. “It’s a hospital. Even they have to respect that.”
I stare at her, dumbfounded. “Are you bloodydamn bent in the head? You need to get everyone and get out.”
“Lyria…”
I don’t stop to reason with her. I shoulder past and burst out of the infirmary, running with my nephew clutched to my chest. The gunshots are closer now. Rough voices yell to one another. A woman’s screams are silenced with a wet thump. I weave through the gaps between the houses, heading for the north watchtower. Doors are broken off plastic hinges, young men run about with arms full of food and tokens and HCs and a thousand things less precious than the life I carry. Liam’s little pale arms cling around my neck. Someone screams “Gamma” and points at me. Terrified, I duck into an alley and lose them in the shadows.
The guard tower is abandoned when we reach it. Its spotlight stares directly into the sky. The Republic soldiers who were there have fled. Somewhere a dog barks. My sister is nowhere to be seen. “Ava,” I call quietly, hoping she’s in the shadows waiting for me. No one answers. Then men’s voices come from between the houses behind me. They followed me into the alley. I rush through the gate. A muddy field stretches all the way to the dark jungle. We’ll never make it. To the right is the camp’s dumpsite, and beyond that the river.
