Soldiers bolt the wicket door on the gate closed, anyone still in the outer city stuck there. Above all the noise in the market square, I hear screaming and howling beyond the barricade. Priest stands on the wooden walk ten feet up on the fourteen-foot wall, looking over the outer city, battling an unseen war of power. A bolt flashes past him. The air ripples and he disappears. I search for my sister who no longer sits beneath the gallows but stumbles helplessly among the wounded.
The gate flares in a rapid whoosh, flames exploding as if the timbers are doused in oil. As quickly, the fire caves in on itself like a hand curling its finger to a fist, leaving behind whorls of smoke. Women scoop buckets of water from the barrels and splash the wood. On the other side, we hear Forerunners screaming, and I wish Priest would shut it off, so we don’t have to listen.
Grabbing my bow, I run to the ladder and scramble up. Over the wall, I witness fires leaping and snuffed out, a city refusing to blaze. Men and women run through the dirt streets, gangs of Biters howling as they chase them down, slingshots pelting rocks, knives twinkling through the air like silver birds. Below the gate, a crowd of Forerunners screams and beats on the door. I hear them, but I can’t see them, light bent around them.
“Silence them, Priest!” I yell.
“Rimma.” His voice sounds half-dead. He flickers into my vision, pale as a ghost, a bolt embedded in his shoulder. “I can’t…not while battling the fires.”
“Fuck, Priest,” I mutter, as he fades out. I cock and load my bow, peek over the wall and search for the Touched. Biters advance on the gate, slings whipping, stones flying at their invisible prey. My bolt sends one man to his knees, groping at his bloody neck. I cock, reload, and shoot another in the chest, his body flying backwards, head cracking into a wall and painting it red as he slides to his death. A young man stands partially concealed in a doorway and snaps his fingers at me. Instantly, I can’t see. I’m stuck in a void of blackness, my eyes wide open, blinded as Mag used to blind me. I cling to the stone wall, disoriented, afraid I’ll fall. “Priest?” I plead, the old terror thrusting me back to the House of God’s Law. “I’m blind.”
Light flashes back into my eyes, a thought screaming into my head. “Do that to them,” I yell. “Blind the Biters, just for a few minutes. We can open the gate and let those people in. Priest?”
“Hurry.” His words slur together, his body fading in and out of view.
I spin on the walk and yell to Cullan, “Colonel!” He can’t hear me over the noise. “Colonel. Fuck!” I load my bow, aim, and press the trigger like a lover. My bolt cracks into the makeshift table left of his fingers. The man jumps back and curses, his eyes searching the crowded square before the gate. “Cullan,” I scream, and wave. “Open the fucking gate!”
The colonel frowns at me, his head tilted with a quizzical expression twisting his face.
Major Javlan, his neck wrapped in gauze, shakes his head, certain I’ve lost my mind. “Commander, I don’t recommend—”
“Trust me,” I scream at him. “Priest can hold them off long enough to let those people in. Do it now. Now!”
“Open the gate,” Cullan shouts. “Prepare for an attack. Close it at my order.” The water-women run from the wet stones before the doors while men raise weapons, prepared to meet a horde of savages. Eight soldiers lift the bar.
“This better work,” I whisper to Priest, “or the fucking
Commander
will have our heads. Let us see them as they come through.”
The gate starts to swing open.
“Now, Priest.” I glance over the wall. For a moment, the cacophony of terror abates. The Forerunners materialize and shove against the opening gates, their voices rising again as salvation appears through the gap. The Biters realize what’s happened and begin to howl, groping in their private blindness. I raise my bow to kill those within my range, but Priest’s arm reaches out and presses it down.
“No,” he whispers, visible to me now. “I won’t help you kill.” He teeters, clutching me.
“Close the gate,” I yell to Cullan. “Close the gate!”
The gate reverses direction, the last of the Forerunners shoving through with a hail of arrows, four men slamming to the ground in the square when the tips find flesh. Priest collapses in my arms, and I stagger back on the narrow walk. A rock slings into my head, sending sparks skittering through my brain as my foot finds nothing but air.
3
2
~Angel~
Time slows as Priest teeters and crumbles against my sister, a black shaft implanted in his shoulder. She catches him, stumbling backwards under his weight on the narrow walk. Her head snaps sideways, a rock careening off her scalp, haloed with droplets of bright blood, as her foot misses, bodies twisted in an odd embrace as they plummet ten feet to the ground.
An unheard cry erupts from my lips as they land with a thud, and I scramble through the frantic crowd of wounded and burned refugees recently arrived through the gate. The tall doors judder closed, the long bar shoved back into iron brackets. Cullan jumps from the gallows and presses toward them through the chaos. Face covered in blood, Rimma is pinned beneath Priest’s limp body, trying to shove him aside with one hand.
“Get him off me,” she shouts, her face contorted with pain. “The bolt…the bolt.” Beside her, the crossbow lies in splintered pieces, bolts strewn across bloody pavers.
“Priest,” I shriek, grabbing at his body. “Priest.”
“I need a litter,” Cullan shouts into the roiling confusion as he kneels beside them. “A litter, here.” He and another man lift Priest, careful of the bolt in his shoulder. Rimma screams as the broken shaft extending from Priest’s body slides from her breast. She presses a hand to her bloody wound.
“Rimma,” I cry, almost afraid to touch her as she rolls to her side.
“Take him to the surgeons,” Cullan orders. The litter-bearers lift Priest and cart him away. I long to follow, but I can’t leave my sister. She’s trying to stand, one foot unable to hold her weight as she appeals to me with nothing but pain in her eyes. Cullan helps her to her feet; then the gate bursts into flames. We stumble backwards in the heat as men and women run for the water barrels. My sister abandoned, the colonel strides into the surging throng of people, shouting orders. “Javlan! Archers on the walls. Now! Target the Touched.”
“Bind my ankle,” my sister shouts over the commotion, a hand to her bloody breast. I’m pulling her toward the surgeons’ makeshift quarters, searching for Priest.
With a growl of frustration, she wrenches her arm from my grip. “Bind me, Angel, so I can fight.”
Turning on my heel, I stare at her. “No. You’re wounded,” I argue. “You can barely stand.”
“Fuck, Angel. You think that matters,” she barks at me. “I’m broken; what else is new? The gate’s on fire. The Biters will break through. The whole Fortress is going to burn.”
Behind me the gate blazes, water sizzling into steam as it splashes futilely against charred timbers. Smoke drifts over us in a rolling fog. Soldiers rally in the square forming ranks; cook-fires lie abandoned. Those wounded who find their feet hobble to the far margins of the square.
“Bind me,” Rimma shouts in my ear, drawing my attention back. “Then find Priest. Stay with him.”
“No,” I protest, “I’ll fight too.”
“The fuck you will,” she snaps at me, her gray eyes blazing copper in the inferno’s feverish light. “Bind my ankle, Angel. Now!”
I reach for her knife and she catches my wrist, her grip crushing, her teeth clenched with anger and pain. “I need to rip my skirt,” I explain.
For a moment, she glowers and then releases her grip, handing me the smaller of her knives. I poke a hole near the hem of my skirt, leave the knife on the stones at our feet, and rip a narrow swath of cloth from the entire edge.
Wagons of wounded trundle into the square from the other gates, mindless drivers eyeing the blazing portal, men and women crying and groaning in agony. Archers climb to the wall walk to flail backwards, blinded, stabbed by black quarrels, bashed with flying stones, bodies erupting in flame, the smell of roasting flesh and scorched hair twisting my stomach. They all smash to the pavers, dead or dying or writhing in pain. More scale the ladders as fires are doused and the screaming victims of this madness dragged away.
“My knife,” Rimma demands.
“I’ll bind you first,” I insist. “Cooperate.” She stands on one foot, holding onto me and gasping as I roll strips of fabric around her foot and then around her torso, over the bleeding wound in her breast. I believe she wants to cry, or perhaps it’s my own tears falling. Once again, we stand behind a bone wall, witnessing death all around us, waiting for our own inevitable destruction, this time without our ancestors to blame for their deception. We stand charged, facing the consequences of our choices in our own lifetimes. A man collapses and vomits blood beside me as I tie off the end of Rimma’s binding, pick up her knife and hold it in my fist. “I have as much right as you to fight,” I tell her.
“No,” she barks. “You swore an oath to me.”
“To defend my hope and innocence?” I yell at her, seething with fury as the man dies at our feet, as the gate flares, chaos and death shrieking in every corner of the square. “While you bear the evils of the world? Well, I’m done with that, Rimma. I’m not innocent. None of us are.” I scream at her, “This world is broken. Everything is broken. Everyone is broken. How do I know if I even exist, if I matter at all, if I’m not a figment of your imagination? I’ll defend you and Priest because loving you is all I have left. That’s all I have that makes any sense. It’s the only thing I know is real, and I won’t sacrifice either of you for our fucking ridiculous oaths!”
My sister blinks at me as I stand red-faced and heaving, mad as a bull before her. A tiny smile twitches at the corner of her lips and then she snorts. I hang onto my fury like a woman scorned, but my frown refuses to stick. I want to laugh and cry at the same time.
“Fine,” she mutters and coughs in the smoky haze. “If there’s anything left of Priest, you’d better get him out here, because when that gate falls, this place will be the pit of Hell. She limps away to join the ranks of armed soldiers, dagger glinting in her hand.
The gate creaks and shifts, a barricade of fire, holding back the howling packs bent on vengeance, on conquest. Will they spare any of us, make slaves of us, fold us into their lives? Screams of “fire” behind me set me spinning. The outer city beyond our gates roars in an inferno without hope, but that’s not the source of panic. Two tall structures on our side of the wall, within sight of the packs, belch black smoke. I run across the square to the nearest surgeon’s door where the men carried Priest. He sits in a corner on the floor, his shoulder bound, head back and eyes closed. His ebony skin can’t hide the pallor of his fatigue and pain, the residue of dirt and sweat marring his face, blood and vomit on his clothes.
Weaving between half-dead bodies, I kneel beside him, hands to his face, desperate kisses waking him. “Priest, I love you. Priest?” I plead. “We need you.” His head lolls, exhausted. “Please, I’ll help you. I’ll sit with you. Just outside the door.” He nods, his dark eyes flooded with despair, his valiant efforts far too weak to save a city. I haul on his hand until he stands, panting. Ducking under his arm, I bear his weight as best I can as we lurch through the crowded space into the square where he sinks down to the stones, back against the surgeon’s wall.
“I can’t stop the fires,” he murmurs to me, his voice so soft I scarcely hear over the shouting and howling ripping the air. He grips my hand as I crouch beside him.
“Unbend light if you can,” I say gently, knowing it’s not enough. He nods, aware it’s all his strength can bear. The sky strangles on billowing, black smoke from the burning outer city. Our eyes water and we cough in the gray haze. The fires devouring the two buildings within the wall refuse to succumb to our feeble efforts to quench their thirst. A third structure smolders as the blaze spreads of its own accord.
The fire on the gate snuffs out in a wink, curls of white smoke rising from the blackened timbers. I glance at Priest and he shakes his head. We all stare as a chunk of the left gate smashes inward, rammed from the other side. A roaring, feral glee erupts over the wall. Something strikes the right side, charred wood cracking like twigs and tumbling into the square. The bar splits in two, both doors shifting and catching on the stones. A hundred voices howl.
“Ready your weapons,” Cullan bellows from the spectral gallows. Archers kneel on the wall walk and at the sides of the gate. Soldiers in the front ranks train their weapons on the door and the burning city beyond. Rimma stands near the rear, leaning on the platform where Cullan shouts orders.
A third and fourth assault crumbles the right door, the left splits and swings partly open. The horde’s strident war cries blast into the square, but there’s no one there.
“Archers, shoot!” Cullan screams, but the attackers beat us to it, a barrage of black quarrels slamming into our front ranks.
“Priest,” I scream. Light ripples, snapping into place, and the packs spew from the air, scores of them hurdling through the smoke and rubble. The gallows platform leaps into flame, the posts into blistering torches. Cullan and his captains, their clothes on fire, hurl themselves from the blaze, disappearing into the melee below.