Storming the Sea Wall

Jarrah's POV

I had four minutes to decide where to put the woman I loved, and every answer was wrong.

The vault had one way in now, since the stairwell came down. A long concrete tunnel ran from the sea wall to the antechamber, wide enough for three men abreast and bent like a bad elbow halfway along. Marcus had spent the last day turning it into a throat. Barricades at the bend. Sandbags. Two of our best shooters behind a slab of old turbine casing, and a third man at the far end with a radio and a grim face.

It was a good position. It would hold for a while.

It would not hold forever. I knew that the way I knew my own name.

"Stay behind the wall," I said.

"No."

"Malia."

"I said no." She'd bound her burned hand in a strip of clean cloth and found a handgun somewhere. I hadn't taught her to use it. I didn't need to ask who had. "You don't get to bury me in the back and call it care."

"I'm not burying you. I'm asking you to be somewhere I can find you."

"Then find me." She checked the magazine with a quick, practised snap that made my stomach twist. "I'll be where you can see me."

I stared at her for exactly one second too long. In that second, the first explosion hit the outer gate.

It wasn't loud. That's what I remember most. A deep, flat thud that came up through the soles of my boots and rattled the bolts in the old walls. Dust sifted from the roof. Someone at the barricade said, "Here we go," very calmly, like a man announcing a train.

Then the tunnel filled with light.

Flashbangs. I knew the sound before I understood it, a white crack that punched the air out of my ears and left a high, thin whine behind. Shapes surged in the glare, men in dark kits with their faces masked. Smoke rolled behind them in a thick grey tide. Someone shouted a count I couldn't make out, and then the whole bend of the tunnel erupted in gunfire.

I dropped behind the casing and pulled Malia down with me. Rounds hammered the steel above us. A shard of concrete tore across the back of my hand, and I barely felt it.

"Hold your fire!" Marcus bellowed. "Let them come into the bend! Let them come!"

They came. I counted six, then ten, bunched in the smoke, and when the lead man stepped into the narrow part of the tunnel, Marcus's voice cracked like a whip. "Now!"

Our line opened up. The noise was beyond anything I'd stood in since the night Callan died, a rolling roar of automatic fire in a space built to throw it back at us. My ears gave out. I fired by feel and by the flicker of muzzle flash, short bursts, steady, the way my father taught me. A masked man went down at the mouth of the bend. Another dragged him back, leaving a dark smear on the floor.

"Jarrah!" Malia's mouth was by my ear. I only knew it from the pressure of her breath. "Left! Left side!"

I turned. A man had come through the smoke along the wall, low, quick, with a short weapon braced at his hip. He was ten metres away and closing, and his muzzle was pointed at the gap between our casing and the barricade. At the gap where Malia knelt.

I don't remember deciding. I remember the weight of my own body going sideways, and the casing scraping my shoulder, and the feel of her under my arm as I covered her with everything I had. The burst hit the steel above us and sprayed fragments across my back. Something stung hot along my ribs. Then Marcus's shooter put the man down from the barricade, and the tunnel went on screaming.

"Are you hit?" I shouted, pulling back to look at her.

"No. You are!"

"It's nothing."

"It's nothing! Jarrah, your jacket..."

"I'm fine." I wasn't sure it was true. I was sure I didn't care. She was breathing, her eyes were wide and furious and alive, and the only thing I could think was *not her*. Not her. Not again.*

Again. The word slipped in sideways, and I locked it away. There'd be time to look at it later.

They pushed for what felt like an hour. In truth, I think it was nine minutes.

Smoke thickened until the tunnel lights turned into smears. Somebody on our side was shouting for ammunition. Somebody else had stopped shouting, and I didn't look to see who. A second wave of flashbangs went off at the bend, and for a long, awful moment I couldn't see anything but white. I felt for Malia's wrist and found it, warm and rapid under my fingers, and held on.

"Marcus!" My own voice sounded far away. "How many?"

"Thirty, maybe forty!" He was crouched ten feet from me with blood running down his neck from a gash I hadn't seen him take. "Alastair's emptied the cupboard. These aren't his usual hired lads. These are his own."

His own. The ones who'd answered to the Kilsyth name before I'd ever sat in my chair. The men who had known Malia since she was small enough to ride on their shoulders. I looked at her. She'd gone very still, hearing it too.

"I know some of them," she said, so quietly I read it off her lips.

"I know."

"One of them taught me to fish."

"Malia."

"I'm all right." She wasn't. I saw the thing she did when she was lying, her chin lifting a fraction. "Keep shooting."

I kept shooting. Behind her, in the dark of the antechamber, the mainframe ticked on. I could just hear it between bursts, that patient mechanical heartbeat. Ninety-six. Ninety-seven. The thing that mattered most in the world was sitting forty metres behind us, counting, while men tried to cut their way through to it.

Between bursts I caught myself thinking of Callan, which was the wrong time and the only time. He'd have hated this tunnel. He'd have said a man who fights in a corridor has already lost the argument, and he'd have been standing right here anyway. I wondered if that was all love was in the end. Standing in the wrong place for the right person.

Malia fired beside me, short and careful. She'd stopped shaking. I noticed it the way you notice a clock stopping in a quiet house. Whatever she was doing, she was doing it by going somewhere far inside herself, and I wanted badly to follow her there and bring her back.

"They're stacking on the left wall," she said.

"How do you know?"

"It's how they were taught." She didn't look at me. "They crowd the wall so nobody can come round."

I called it to Marcus. His men put a burst along the stone, and the stacking shapes broke apart, and something sour and grateful twisted in me at once. She had just given away men she'd known since childhood to keep the rest of us breathing.

The barricade shuddered. A grenade, one of theirs, had landed short, and the shockwave knocked two of our shooters flat. Dust and smoke rolled over us. I heard Marcus yell and the line stutter, and through the grey I saw a figure break from the bend and sprint straight for our casing, a big man with a rifle slung and a blade drawn.

He was on us before I could swing my weapon. His shoulder slammed into mine and drove me backward against the wall. I felt my ribs go with a flare of white agony, and the gun spun out of my hand. His forearm came across my throat.

"Calaby," he hissed, close enough that I could smell the smoke on his breath. "Your father's dead. Your name's dead. Go to sleep."

Then there was a crack beside my ear, and his weight went slack against me.

I looked down. Malia stood over him with her gun still raised, both hands shaking, her burned one wrapped around the grip. She'd fired at point-blank range. I'd never seen her face like that. It was open and terrified and completely resolute.

"I know him," she whispered. "I knew him."

I took the gun from her fingers with the gentlest hands I'd ever used. Pulled her in against my chest. She came without protest, like she'd been waiting. Her whole body shook against mine, and I turned my back to the bend and bent over her so that my shoulders and spine became the roof of her world.

"I've got you," I said into her hair. "Stay here. Don't look. I've got you."

"Jarrah, they'll hit you."

"Let them."

"Don't say that!"

"Then I'll say this." I could feel my own voice break. "I'm not stepping back from you. Not tonight. Not ever. If something comes through, it comes through me."

She made a sound I didn't have a name for, and gripped my shirt in both fists.

It ended the way those things end, not with a victory but with a lull.

The firing slowed. A last flashbang rolled harmlessly down the tunnel and went off against the far wall. Through a thinning veil of smoke, I saw shapes dragging themselves backward around the bend, carrying their wounded. A few lay still where they'd fallen. I counted our own, and the number made my throat close. Two of Marcus's men. One young man I'd hired last spring, named Ben, had a girlfriend and a motorbike and a habit of singing under his breath.

"They're pulling back," Marcus rasped. He'd slid down the wall with a hand clamped over his shoulder. "For now. They'll regroup and come again. Harder."

"How long?"

"Ten minutes. Maybe less." He looked up at me with eyes like burnt-out lamps. "They know what they're after. They'll try the doors next."

"The doors."

"The vault doors." He nodded toward the end of the tunnel, where a pair of enormous steel slabs hung open on their hinges, rusted but intact. "Reinforced. My grandfather's era. If we can close them..."

"We close them."

"The mechanism's seized. It has been for years."

"Then we unseize it." I was already moving. I hauled Malia up with me, and she stumbled and found her feet. My side was on fire. Warm blood ran down under my shirt, and I realised the sting on my ribs hadn't been a scrape at all. I pushed it aside. "Everyone not bleeding to death, on the doors. Now."

Malia caught my sleeve. In the smoky half-light, her face was streaked grey and pale, and her eyes were enormous.

"You're hit," she said.

"I know."

"Jarrah, how badly?"

"I don't know yet." I tried to smile. It didn't work. "Ask me when the doors are shut."

"I'm asking you now."

I looked at her. Don't lie. I'd promised. The fear in her face was so bare, so fully hers, that I didn't have it in me to build a comfortable shape around the truth.

"Bad enough that I'd rather you didn't see it," I said quietly. "Not bad enough to stop me. Is that fair?"

She pressed her lips together. A tear tracked through the soot on her cheek. "It's honest," she said. "I'll be honest."

Behind us, down in the dark of the antechamber, the mainframe gave a low electronic chime, soft and clear, like a bell in a church nobody had entered in years.

I turned. On the screen, small and white, a new number had appeared.

98%.

And from the far end of the tunnel, back around the bend where the smoke still hung, came a sound I hadn't heard in all that noise: the slow, deliberate hum of a heavy engine idling, and the grind of something metal being dragged into position.