CHAPTER 11: The second attack

POV: Imani

For three days, I had managed to ignore the little piece of blue fabric that had been tucked in my pocket. I went through the motions, pretending it wasn’t bothering me in any way whatsoever. I ate my meals in the mess hall whenever someone slid a plate in front of me, answered Kovac’s questions about the mark on my arm, and tried not to notice how much weaker my explanations sounded each time. Every night, though, I’d lie awake staring at nothing in particular, with the fabric between my fingers, running my thumb over its ragged edge and asking questions it couldn’t possibly answer. Who had placed it there? How had they discovered it? And why hadn’t anyone in this territory said a word about it since?

I was in the kitchen, halfway through boiling some water I was going to use. I’d started the task on my own because I needed something to occupy my hands and mind, something ordinary that didn’t require me to think too hard. The kettle had just begun to rumble when the alarm sounded.

It wasn’t like the one I’d heard during the night a few days earlier. That one had been urgent but straightforward, a single horn blaring through the darkness. This time, it was three loud blasts that rang out from different sections of the wall almost simultaneously. I barely had time to register the difference before the kitchen emptied around me. Spoons clattered against the floor, someone knocked over a chair, and people rushed towards the exits without stopping to collect anything they’d left behind.

I followed them into the courtyard, and the sight that greeted me there was enough to make my stomach drop. Seeing everything in daylight made the situation far worse than I’d anticipated. The darkness during the previous attack had given everything a sense of unreality. Shapes had been difficult to make out, and the shadows had softened the full extent of what was happening. There was no such comfort now. Under the bright afternoon sun, every detail was painfully clear. The blood, the panic, the infected pressing against the defenses. When I reached the open courtyard, I understood just how bad things were.

There were three separate points where the infected had broken through the defenses, and each one of them was swarming with people struggling to contain them. Guards were shouting out orders, others were dragging the injured away, and the infected kept pushing forward with force despite the weapons being turned against them. This wasn’t a random occurrence. The breaches had happened too close together, too precisely. Someone had orchestrated this chaos.

“Ellis!”

Beckett’s voice cut through the noise, calling out to me. I turned towards him right away and saw him waving me over to the eastern courtyard, where several guards had gathered around someone lying on the ground. Blood was spreading quickly beneath the man’s body, darkening the stone around his leg. I broke into a run immediately.

The guard had a deep gash wound running along his thigh, and blood was pouring from it fast enough to tell me we had very little to no time to get to work. I dropped down to my knees beside him, barely registering the other men trying to speak over one another. I tore a strip of cloth from my own sleeve and tied it above the wound, then caught the attention of the nearest guard.

“Apply pressure here,” I commanded, guiding his hands down onto the injury, making sure that he understood exactly where to press. “Don’t let up, no matter what.” I moved my fingers quickly as I assessed the wound, locating the artery and trying to control the bleeding with what little energy I had available. The man’s face had gone so pale, and his breathing was becoming uneven. I needed to slow the blood loss before he lost too much. “I need something I can use as a proper tourniquet. Right now!”

Zane dropped down across from me, blood smeared across his own gear from maybe an earlier encounter. His eyes moved from the wound to my hands, and for once, he didn’t seem to look like he was entirely certain of what to do. I’d seen him take control of rooms full of people without raising his voice, watched others move at the slightest indication from him. But as for now, he was looking at me, waiting for my instructions.

“What do I do?” he asked, no hesitation whatsoever sounding in his voice, something I hadn’t expected to hear from him.

“You listen to me,” I said, not looking up at him, with both my hands still pressed hard on the wound. “Right now, that’s the only order that matters.”

He didn’t argue. He simply reached for a length of leather strap attached to a nearby pack and handed it over to me, his movements controlled despite the chaos surrounding us. His jaw was set tight, and his eyes kept returning to the injured guard, but he made sure to stay completely focused on what I was doing.

“Wrap it above the wound. As tight as you can.” I ordered, catching his wrist briefly and guiding his hands into position. For a second, our fingers tangled over the man’s bleeding leg as we worked, but there was no room left for us to acknowledge it. The only thing that mattered right now was to stop the excess blood. “Tighter, Zane.”

He pulled the strap firmly into place, and the bleeding began to slow down. I watched closely, checking the pressure before allowing myself to finally take in a breath.

“Good. Keep it there.”

I shifted back onto my heels, taking a quick moment to assess the situation around us. The courtyard was still in chaos. People were calling for help, guards were carrying the injured towards the inner buildings, and the sounds coming from the breaches hadn’t stopped yet. The man in front of me needed attention, but he wasn’t the only one. I couldn’t afford to stay in one place for too long.

The next hour passed in a blur of activity. I was back in triage mode, applying pressure to people’s wounds, assessing injuries, and shouting instructions over the loud noise. People were listening, surprisingly enough to me. They moved when I told them to move, brought me what I needed, and helped carry the injured wherever I directed them. Zane stayed close as well, not hovering or trying to shield me from the fighting, but working alongside me. Whenever I told him who needed help first and who could wait, he acted without hesitation or asking me any sort of questions. He didn’t challenge my decisions or demand explanations while people were bleeding in front of us.

Perhaps it should have felt strange. Until recently, he’d watched his own advisor treat me like a potential liability, and I was still getting used to the fact that I could give him an order and expect him to follow it. But there was no room for any of that now. He was a king, and I was simply a medic, and people were dying. Whatever stood between us could wait.

“Get this one,” I instructed, crouching beside a guard whose hand had been severely crushed. The skin on his arm was torn open, and I could see his bone beneath the blood. He was struggling to keep still, his face twisted with extreme pain as another guard tried to hold him steady. “He needs to see Kovac right now. If we wait any longer, he’s going to lose that hand.”

Zane looked down at the injury, then back at me. “You’re sure about this?”

“I’m sure.” I met his eyes, keeping my voice as firm as possible even as I felt the weight of the decision settling heavily over me. There wasn’t time to second guess myself. “Take him to her. Now.”

He didn’t hesitate once again. He carefully lifted the injured man, mindful of his hand despite the urgency, and carried him towards the inner gate. As he moved, he called out an order that sent several guards scrambling to clear a path through the courtyard. I turned back to the next injured person before he had even disappeared from view.

Eventually, the crucial points of breach held. Guards and anyone armed with makeshift weapons pushed against the infected, driving them down one by one. The organized front began to crumble under the sheer numbers of people that were fighting back and the infected pressing in from every direction. It wasn’t clean or easy if I was being honest, and there were moments when I thought we were going to lose control of one of the entrances entirely, but the guards held their ground. By the time the last of the infected fell still, the courtyard had become something I could barely look at without feeling completely sick to my stomach. Bodies were strewn across the stones, blood had soaked into the ground, and the air was thick with the smell of it. The walls had clearly witnessed horrors like this before. And I’m just t so sure they would probably witness them again.

I was on my knees beside a guard who had sustained a shallow cut, carefully finishing a line of stitches. My fingers were beginning to ache from all the work, and my clothes were stained with blood that wasn’t mine, but I kept my attention on the wound. The man flinched when I pulled the thread through his skin, and I comforted him, telling him to hold still before tying off the stitch.

“Over here. You need to look at this.”

The voice came from near the eastern wall. I finished securing the thread, cut it, and rose up to my feet. Zane fell into step beside me as we made our way towards the guard who had called out. Neither of us saying a word. We were both exhausted, but the adrenaline hadn’t really left our systems, and the short walk felt strangely tense after everything we’d just been through.

By the time we reached him, I saw one of the dead infected lying apart from the others. A guard was crouched beside it, holding a torch close to its forearm despite the daylight. I moved nearer, trying to understand what exactly it was that he wanted us to see. At first, I thought it was just another injury from the fight, but the markings were too deliberate. Clean lines had been cut or burned into the skin, forming a pattern that honestly didn’t resemble damage from any weapon I’d seen in my life.

I crouched beside the body, ignoring the instinctive warning telling me not to get any closer to something that had been trying to kill us less than an hour ago. The guard shifted the torch to give me a better view, and I leaned in.

The shape was unnerving. Its lines were branched out with precise symmetry from a central point, spreading across the infected’s forearm. I stared at it, trying to make sense of what I was looking at, but a chill had already begun creeping through my chest and veins, slow and sickening, the recognition settling deep in my chest a half second before my mind could fully catch up.

I knew that shape.

I’d seen it two nights earlier, beneath the harsh, buzzing light of an examination room, when Kovac had carefully documented the mark on my own palm.

I looked down at the infected’s forearm again, hoping I was mistaken, hoping that the resemblance would disappear if I examined it more closely.

But it didn’t. It was exactly the same pattern.