Teeth scrape frantically against my palm. Tiny fingers seek my face. My cheeks painted with her blood. With my free hand, I tug open her jacket. I’ve got to compress the wound or she’ll bleed out.
I grab the collar of her shirt and rip downward, exposing her torso. I wad up the remnant and press it just below her rib cage, against the bullet hole weeping blood. She jerks at my touch with a strangled sob.
“What did I tell you about that, soldier?” I whisper. “What’s the first priority?”
Slick lips slide over my palm. No words come out.
“No bad thoughts,” I tell her. “No bad thoughts. No bad thoughts. Because bad thoughts make us go soft. They make us soft. Soft. Soft. And we can’t go soft. We can’t. What happens when we go soft?”
The woods brim with menacing shadows. Deep in the trees, there’s a snapping sound. A boot crunching on the frozen ground? Or an ice-encrusted branch, splintering? We could be surrounded by a hundred enemies. Or zero.
I race through our options. There aren’t many. And they all suck.
First option: We stay. The problem is stay for what. The dead recruit’s unit is unaccounted for. Whoever killed the kid is also unaccounted for. And Teacup has no chance of surviving without medical attention. She has minutes, not hours.
Second option: We run. The problem is where. The hotel? Teacup would bleed to death before we make it back, plus she may have taken off for a good reason. The caverns? Can’t risk going through Urbana, which means adding miles of open fields and many hours to a journey that ends at a place that probably isn’t safe, either.
There’s a third option. The unthinkable one. And the only one that makes sense.
The snow falls heavier, the gray deepens. I cup her face with one hand and press the other into the wound, but I know it’s hopeless. My bullet tore through her gut; the injury is catastrophic.
Teacup is going to die.
I should leave her. Now.
But I don’t. I can’t. Like I told Zombie on the night Camp Haven blew, the minute we decide one person doesn’t matter, they’ve won, and now my words are the chain that binds me to her.
I hold her in my arms in the awful dead stillness of the woods in snow.
6
I EASE HER DOWN onto the forest floor. Drained of all color, her face is only slighter darker than the snow. Her mouth hangs open, her eyelids flutter. She’s slipped into unconsciousness. I don’t think she’ll wake again.
My hands are shaking. I’m struggling to keep it together. I’m pissed as hell at her, at myself, at the seven billion impossible dilemmas their arrival brought, at the lies and the maddening inconsistencies and all the ridiculous, hopeless, stupid unspoken promises that have been broken since they came.
Don’t go soft. Think about what matters, right here, right now; you’re good at that.
I decide to wait. It can’t be much longer. Maybe after she’s dead, the softness inside me will pass and I’ll be able to think clearly. Every uneventful minute means I still have time.
But the world is a clock winding down, and there are no such things as uneventful minutes anymore.
A heartbeat after I decide to stay with her, the percussive thrum of rotors shatters the silence. The sound of the choppers snaps the spell. Knowing what matters: besides shooting, the thing I’m best at.
I can’t let them take Teacup alive.
If they take her, they may be able to save her. And if they save her, they’ll run her through Wonderland. There’s the tiniest chance that Zombie’s still safe at the hotel. A chance that Teacup wasn’t running from anything, just snuck off to find me. One trip by either of us down the rabbit hole and everybody’s doomed.
I pull my sidearm from the holster.
The minute we decide . . . I wish I had a minute. I wish I had thirty seconds. Thirty seconds would be a lifetime. A minute would b
e an eternity.
I level the gun at her head and lift up my face to the gray. Snow settles on my skin, where it quivers for a moment before melting.
Sullivan had her Crucifix Soldier and now I have mine.
No. I am the soldier. Teacup is the cross.