Chapter 10: Pip

"Don't!"

Mara moved before she'd decided to. She hit Pip at the waist with both arms and bore her down, rabbit and all, and the world went white.

It wasn't an explosion, not the kind in movies. It was a bang that ate every other sound, a flash that put a ringing purple hole in her eyes, and a roar of pressure that slapped her flat against the concrete. Smoke boiled out. The girl was screaming underneath her. Somewhere a man was shouting, and somebody else was shouting back, and every voice sounded like it was coming through water.

Flashbang, her brain supplied, calmly, as if reading from a chart. Not a grenade. Stun round. They want us alive.

She rolled onto her knees, half blind, with Pip clutched against her chest. The kid was sobbing but whole. Mara ran her hand down her back, her ribs, her arms. No blood. A blessing.

"Tobias!"

"Here!" His voice was thick and distant. A hand closed on her shoulder, and she twisted around and saw him, gray with dust, a cut over his eye, wrench gripped in one fist. "Mar, they're coming in the front!"

Through the smoke she could see them. Black jackets, black masks, a wave of them pouring from the stockyard tunnel with rifles up. Not shouting. Not hesitating. Just moving, in neat clean lines, like machines. They were cutting through the raiders without fuss, dropping men with short sharp bursts, and where a raider tried to run, a Concord soldier simply stepped into his path and clubbed him down.

"Hold the line!" Bram bellied out of the smoke, bellowing. He had a rifle in each hand and blood running down the side of his face. "Hold, damn you! Get the kids back! Ines, take the left! Dev! Dev, where are you, you little."

He stopped. His eyes fell on something across the chamber, and his face went slack.

Mara followed his stare.

By the generator, half hidden in smoke, a thin shaved head had just ducked behind a Concord soldier. The soldier turned, nodded, and pointed at the supply tunnel. Dev looked back once, very quickly, straight at Bram, and then vanished.

"No," Bram said softly. "Oh, you little."

"Bram!" Mara grabbed his sleeve. "Later! Get your people out!"

He tore his gaze free. For a heartbeat she saw the whole shape of the betrayal go through him. Then he turned and roared, a sound like something breaking.

"Back to the trucks! Everybody! GO!"

It became chaos. Mara had been in emergencies, real ones, mass casualty nights on the ward when the sirens never stopped, and the shape of this was the same.

Panic first, then a kind of crushing slow motion. She stood and picked Pip up, no weight at all, rabbit tucked in the crook of her elbow, and ran. Tobias ran beside her, swinging the wrench at anyone who got close. A soldier stepped in front of them and Tobias hit him across the knees, and the man went down howling.

"Hell of a swing," Mara panted.

"Baseball!"

"You never played baseball!"

"I watched a lot!"

The chamber was a bowl of noise now. Mara heard a baby wailing and a man swearing and the flat dry stutter of rifle fire, and under all of it, steady as a drumbeat, the generator Tobias had just brought back to life, still roaring, still doing its job. She had a mad urge to laugh. All that work, and the first thing the lights did was show everybody where to die.

They reached the side tunnel. The trucks stood in a ragged row, engines already catching. Raiders were piling into the beds, hauling children, kicking at the gates. Bram's truck was at the end, a flatbed with a cab like a rusted refrigerator, and Ines, the woman with the braid, was already at the wheel.

"In!" she screamed. "In, in, in!"

Mara shoved Pip up into the back, then Tobias, then scrambled up after them. A bullet whined off the tailgate and sparked. Another smacked into the wood by her hand, sending splinters into her glove. She flung herself flat.

"Bram!" Ines yelled out the window. "Where's Bram?"

"There!"

He was running full tilt across the chamber, a rifle in each hand, with half a dozen Concord soldiers behind him. He wasn't going to make it. Mara could see it in the angle of the soldiers' guns. Another ten feet and they'd have him.

Then something darted out of the smoke from the left. A small figure, in a too-big coat, with a face full of terror.

Dev.

He was holding a rifle. His whole body shook. He raised it, and for one awful second Mara thought he was going to shoot Bram himself. But he swung the barrel up and fired, wildly, at the ceiling.

A pipe burst. A white torrent of steam roared down in a wall between Bram and the soldiers, and the Concord men fell back, cursing, hands over their faces.

Bram didn't slow. He hit the truck bed at a run and Mara grabbed his collar and hauled. He landed in a heap, breathless, and lay there staring at the sky that wasn't there.

"Why?" he gasped.

"Go!" Dev's voice cracked in the steam. "Go, Bram, go, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, they said they'd feed us, they said."

A Concord soldier came out of the white and hit him with the butt of a rifle. Dev crumpled. The soldier looked up, saw the truck, and raised his weapon.

"Drive!" Mara shrieked.

Ines floored it. The truck lurched forward so hard that Mara slammed against the cab. Tires screamed. They shot down the tunnel in a roar of exhaust, one truck, then another, then a third, in a long ragged line, with the cries of the dying chamber falling away behind them.

The tunnel opened. It was a ramp, climbing, a long concrete throat lit by a fading gray at the far end. Mara pulled Pip into her lap and held her tight. The girl had stopped crying. She was staring up at Mara with huge, solemn eyes.

"You saved my rabbit," she said.

"I did?"

"Daddy says nothing saves rabbits. Rabbits just run." She frowned. "You didn't run."

Tobias made a strange noise beside her, half a laugh, half a sob. He pressed the back of his hand against his mouth. Mara didn't look at him. She was afraid of what she'd see.

"Neither did you," she told Pip.

The light grew. The tunnel mouth rushed toward them, and the three trucks burst out into the open, into the stockyard, a wide frozen field of rusted pens and empty chutes, all of it under a flat gray sky. Wind hit them in the face like a slap. Mara blinked, her eyes aching, and slowly, slowly, they began to focus.

Parked across the exit, in a perfect line, were twenty black trucks.

Every one had a mounted gun on its roof. Every gun was pointed at them. And standing on the hood of the lead truck, in a pressed black coat, with the ash drifting down around his shoulders like confetti, was Silas Voss.

He saw her. His eyes found hers across a hundred yards of frozen mud, and he smiled. Then he raised one gloved hand and waved.