The Defense of Terminal 2

Malia's POV

The first round hit the wall beside my head, and I counted it.

One. That was how my father taught me to stay alive. Count the shots, count the seconds between them, count who is still breathing on your side. Fear is only arithmetic you haven't finished yet.

"Down!" Pike roared from behind the stacked containers, and I was already down, knees on wet concrete, rifle tucked into my shoulder. The second round went through the air where my head had been. Three, four and five followed in a ragged line along the steel, sparks jumping off the corrugated walls like something alive.

"They're hitting the east gate," I said. "Not the main one. They want us looking east."

"How do you know?" Pike didn't turn around. He was feeding a fresh magazine into his rifle with hands that had done it ten thousand times.

"Because it's what I would do." I hated how easily the words came. "Loud on one side, quiet on the other. The quiet side is where the real unit goes in."

Terminal 2 was a mile of concrete and cranes, the biggest shipping yard on the harbor, and Jarrah had decided we would hold it. It was the only ground in Melbourne that Alastair needed more than we did. Whoever owned Terminal 2 owned the cargo routes, and whoever owned the routes owned the next ten years. My father knew it. So did Jarrah. Neither of them had said it aloud, because neither of them had to.

Glass exploded somewhere above us. The sniper in the crane cab. I pressed my back into the container and listened to the building breathe, the groan of loose sheet metal, boots on the gantry, a man yelling coordinates in a voice I almost recognised. Almost. I pushed the thought down. I couldn't afford to know anyone's voice tonight.

"Malia." Jarrah's voice came through the earpiece, low and flat. "Position."

"Container row C, northeast of the breach. I'm fine."

"You said that two minutes ago."

"And I was fine two minutes ago."

A pause. I heard gunfire behind his silence, closer than mine. "Stay where I can find you," he said, and the line clicked off.

He had done it six times since the first shot. Six. I'd started counting that too. Position. Where are you? Say something. He never said anything sweet. He didn't know how, and I'd stopped wanting him to. What he gave me instead was a hand on a rope in the dark. Every time his voice cut through the noise, my breathing went back to normal. I hated how much I needed that. I needed it anyway.

Pike jerked his chin toward the gap between two containers. "Breachers. Left side."

I looked. Four men in dark gear were moving along the wall in a stack, close and quiet, the way Kilsyth units always moved. The one in front carried a charge the size of a lunchbox. They were going for the side door of the loading office, which was the only entrance that opened straight into the building's main corridor.

Our men were inside that corridor. Eleven of them, plus the techs, plus the server cart with the stolen file still running on it.

"Pike, cover me."

"Where are you going?"

"Closer." I was already moving.

I went low and fast along the wall, shoulder scraping steel. Rain had started again, thin and cold, and it ran down the back of my collar and under my vest. My boots slipped once on the wet concrete, and my heart slammed against my ribs. I caught myself on a container handle and kept going. The breaches were twenty metres off now. Fifteen. I could smell them, wet fabric and gun oil and a faint trace of the cologne Kilsyth men wore on duty. My father insisted on it. He said a unit that smelled the same would think the same.

I raised the rifle and fired at the wall above the lead man's head.

I didn't want to kill him. I'm not sure why that mattered so much, but it did. The round cracked off the steel, and all four of them dropped into a crouch. In the half second they were looking up, Pike's shots came in from my left, two clean hits on the charge man's shoulder. The lunchbox fell. Nobody picked it up.

"Fall back!" someone shouted, and the stack broke apart and ran.

I stayed against the wall with my chest heaving. My hands were shaking now that I'd stopped moving. It always happened after, never during. I watched them go and thought, I know that man's gait. The one on the end. He limps on the left. Hale. Corbin Hale, my father's vanguard commander, who used to slip me peppermints under the dinner table when I was nine.

I could have shot him in the leg. I was close enough. I didn't.

"You're thinking too loud," Pike said, dropping down beside me. He was sixty years old and had been with the Calaby family since before Jarrah was born, and he looked at me the way a man looks at a dog he's decided to keep. "Don't. Not here."

"That was Hale."

"I know who it was."

"He gave me peppermints."

"And he'll put a bullet in you tonight without losing sleep." Pike's voice wasn't unkind. "Whatever you owe them, you paid it when you walked out of that house. Now move. Our side door is still ours."

We ran back along the wall together. Inside the building, the air was warmer, stale with sweat and smoke, and the noise dropped to a dull roar through the thick concrete. I found Wren hunched over the server cart in the corridor, a screen glowing in front of her face. She was twenty-three and talked in whispers when she was frightened, which was most of the time.

"Percentage?" I asked.

"Seventy-eight." She didn't look up. "It's slow. Every time the building shakes, the link drops, and I lose a few minutes."

"Can you move it?"

"If I move it, I lose it."

"Then don't move it." I put my hand flat on top of the cart, as if I could hold it still. "Nobody touches this. Not even if the walls come down."

Wren nodded without speaking. Her eyes were red-rimmed. We were all running on nothing.

The side door shuddered behind me. I spun, rifle up, and found Jarrah standing in the frame with blood on his sleeve and a sniper's case slung across his back.

"It's not mine," he said before I asked. His eyes went over me anyway, head to boots, quick and thorough, a man checking an inventory. Something in his jaw eased. "You went out the side."

"Four breachers. I stopped them."

"You stopped them." He said it slowly, as though he were testing the weight of it. "Pike said you went in alone."

"Pike was covering me."

"Pike is sixty. I told him to keep you inside."

"Pike works for you, not me." I lifted my chin. "I'm not a hostage, Jarrah. I'm not furniture you move around."

He crossed the corridor in three strides. For a second I thought he was going to shout. He had that look he got before he did something he'd later regret. Instead, he put two fingers under my chin and turned my face toward the light, studying a cut along my cheekbone I hadn't known I had.

"Concrete chip," I said.

"I know what it is." His thumb passed over the edge of the cut, careful, almost nothing. "I can't be everywhere. That's the problem. I can't be on the wall and on you at the same time."

"Then be on the wall."

"I am."

"Then trust me to be on mine."

The silence that followed was ugly and honest. Down the corridor, a man laughed too loudly at nothing. Somewhere above us the sniper's rifle cracked, once, twice, a long breath, a third.

"I trust you," Jarrah said at last, quietly, as if it cost him. "It's your father I don't trust. He knows what you're worth to me. He's going to use it."

I wanted to tell him I knew. I wanted to say I had been calculating that exact risk since we left the safehouse. Instead I said, "Then let him try."

Something that was almost a smile crossed his mouth. It vanished at once. He stepped back, took the sniper's case off his shoulder, and clicked it open with practiced fingers.

"Roof," he said. "Third level. There's a gantry that gives me the whole east approach. I need someone on the stairwell I can trust."

"You have Pike."

"Pike's covering the loading dock." He didn't look at me. "I need you where I can hear you."

It took me a moment to understand what he was asking. He wasn't asking me to guard the stairwell. He was asking me to stay close enough to be a voice in his ear while he worked. He was asking me to let him keep me alive.

"Fine," I said.

We went up together. The stairwell stank of damp concrete and old oil, and our boots echoed in the narrow space. On the second landing, a stray round whined through a broken window and clanged off the railing. Jarrah's arm came across my chest before the sound finished. His hand pressed flat against my sternum, hard, holding me still, and I felt his heart through the heel of his palm. It was going faster than his face showed.

"Sorry," he muttered, and let go.

"Don't be."

On the roof, the wind hit like a slap. Beyond the edge, the harbor lay dark and hammered with rain, long cranes standing against a sky the colour of old bruises. Down on the concrete yard, forty or fifty of my father's men were moving in staggered lines, using the container rows for cover. I recognised the formation. I had drawn it on a napkin once, at fourteen, for a father who pretended he wasn't impressed.

Jarrah settled behind the parapet with the rifle and the world seemed to narrow around him. I crouched a few metres to his left, scanning the stairwell door and the sky, and tried not to watch him work. I failed. He breathed out slowly before every shot. His shoulders didn't move. A man across the yard fell and didn't get up, and Jarrah's expression didn't change at all.

I thought about what it would have been like to meet him some other way. At a bar, in a city that wasn't burning. I thought about it for a long second and then shoved the thought out of my head, because I had no right to it.

"Malia."

"Here."

"Say something."

"Like what?"

"Anything." He fired. "I like hearing it."

I almost laughed. The sound came out strange, cracked down the middle. "You're a terrible man to take a bullet for."

"I know." Another shot. "Talk."

So I talked. I told him about the peppermints, and Hale, and the way my father hummed under his breath when he was winning. I said it was a flat little tune, three notes up, two down, and that I'd always known he was close when I heard it, long before he walked into the room. Jarrah listened without turning his head. When I ran out of things to say about the man who raised me, I started on other things. The first rifle I ever held. The smell of the Kilsyth stables. My mother's laugh, which I could barely remember anymore.

Somewhere in the middle of it, the sky split open with a flat boom that made the whole roof shiver.

"Armour," Jarrah said. His voice had changed. He'd stopped being a man listening to a story and turned back into the one who'd held Melbourne's docks for eleven years. He lowered the rifle and pointed. Down at the main gate, two boxy vehicles rolled out from behind a warehouse, heavy and slow, their steel plating catching the floodlights. Behind them the infantry moved up in a tight wedge, close against the armour.

"That's the vanguard," I said.

"Can we stop them?"

I looked at the vehicles for a long moment. At the angle of their approach. At the narrow channel of concrete between two stacks of containers, wide enough for one tank, maybe, and not for two.

"Maybe," I said. "I need a radio, a forklift driver, and about four minutes."

"You'll have the radio."

"And Jarrah."

"Yes?"

"I need you to not check on me for the next four minutes."

His jaw worked. I watched him decide. It took him almost three full seconds, and I knew it hurt, and I loved him a little for the three seconds.

"Four minutes," he said. "Then I check."

I ran for the stairs.

I was halfway down, one hand on the cold railing, when the earpiece crackled, and a voice that wasn't Jarrah's came through. Smooth. Unhurried. A voice that hummed between sentences.

"Hello, sweetheart," my father said. "I hear you've been busy."

The railing went slick under my palm. Below me, the building shook with a heavier blast than anything yet, and the stairwell lights went out.