Shadow Heart (18 page)

Liz gritted her teeth and stabbed the needle into Grace’s uninjured thigh. She depressed the plunger to deliver the adrenaline into her system, then withdrew the syringe and stepped away.

One
, she counted,
two…

Grace Sawyer sat up suddenly, drawing in a desperate breath and grabbing at her chest. Liz knew the effects of intravenous adrenaline all too well, as it had been part of her soldier training. Right now Grace’s heart would be beating so hard it hurt. She struggled to breathe at first, and when her eyes fell on Liz they were filled with suspicion and fear. “
You
,” she wheezed. “What did you do to me?”

That answers the question of whether she knows who I am,
Liz thought.

The commander’s eyes swept the tent, making note of the dead, and followed with a sharp intake of breath. Liz was on her in an instant, one hand pressed against the back of her head as the other covered her mouth and choked back her cry for help. Grace struggled, but Liz held on tight.

“Listen!” Liz paused so that Grace could discern the sounds of battle outside, and her eyes widened. She struggled more, but Liz would not let her go, not until she could be sure. “The Spectorium is here,” she explained. “They killed your people, not me. Then I killed
them
. Lucky for you, or they’d be carrying you back to Derek Blaine right now.”

Grace’s attention shifted again, this time to her left. Liz followed her line of sight and saw the deep sapphire hilt of the commander’s Spectral Gladius, and grimaced. An oversight on her part.

“Don’t try it,” she warned. “You can barely walk, much less fight. I’ve certainly been better, but you won’t stand a chance against me with that leg. So you can keep struggling against me until more Specters walk in here and probably kill us both, or you can let me help you.”

Grace paused and looked straight into Liz’s eyes, obviously still considering her chances if she grabbed that Gladius and made a run for it. But she knew the reality of her situation, and her suspicion melted into resignation.

“Alright,” Liz sighed. “I’m going to let go of you now. Don’t do anything stupid.” Grace nodded, and Liz released her. She paused for a moment to make sure Grace kept her word, then relaxed. “We have to get out of this camp. Right now.”

“I can’t just run,” Grace said. “I need to find Cren—” She had been moving her legs over the side of the bed, but suddenly grabbed hold of her head. Her breathing was still erratic, “What did you give me?”

“Adrenaline,” Liz replied, making note of a pack laying on the nearby table. Likely it had been the doctor’s. “His idea,” she motioned to the dead assistant at the entrance to the tent. She grabbed the pack and emptied it, then hastened to the supply chest. “Your body will normalize in a minute or so, but when you crash it’s not going to be pretty.” She rummaged through the supplies, looking for everything they would need: needle and thread, alcohol, bandages,
Miracle Heal
, pain killers, even a couple of body warmers…

“What are you doing?” Grace asked.

“I’m not going back out there unprepared.”

“The Wilderness? There’s no need,” Grace said. “Once we reunite with the others they will have supplies.”

Liz zipped up the bag and retrieved another gun from the fallen Specters. She held it out to Grace, who still sat awkwardly on the bed, “These ‘others,’ are they going to be at the center of the battle?”

Grace paused, “Probably.”

“Then that’s the last place we want to be. Take the gun, and I’ll need you to carry the pack as well. My back isn’t doing so well at the moment.”

“I won’t leave my men to fight alone while I run away.”

“You’re no good to them dead,” Liz argued. “You’re not much good to them at all right now, truthfully.” She held out the pack. “Time to go.”

“Why are you doing this?” Grace asked suspiciously. “What is it you want from me?”

A little gratitude would be nice
, she thought dryly. “You know the quickest way out of the camp. I don’t. Now come on. I can help you walk.”

“I can do it on my own.” Grace attempted to rise, but her leg gave out under her weight and she pitched forward. Liz, having foreseen the event, was there, and caught Grace in her arms. She helped the commander remain steady, but also slung the pack over the other woman’s shoulder.

“You were saying?” she offered the gun again, and this time Grace took it—albeit bitterly. She grabbed Grace’s weapons belt and helped her put it on. “Once we’re out there, we might run into more Specters. Don’t try to fight them without me…we stand a much better chance if we stay together.”

Grace nodded.

“Which way are we going?”

“Northwest,” Grace replied. “We’re in the North section of the camp, but the Spectorium was tracking us from the Northeast.”

Liz grimaced as she placed Grace’s arm over her shoulder and then held on to the commander’s waist. The strain was like fire licking at her back, but there was no other way. Grace could not support the leg.

They walked past the dead bodies to the tent entrance, and Liz turned to her with eyebrows raised, “You ready?”

Grace could have been many things in that moment. Angry. Scared. Panicked. But the only word Liz could think of to describe her was
determined
. She took a deep breath, “I’m ready.”

Liz pulled back the flap, and the two of them emerged into the chaos of the night.

G
RACE DID HER BEST
to keep as much weight off Aurora as possible, but eventually her struggle to do as much as she could on her own became more of a hindrance than a help. So she leaned in as she might have done with a crutch, embracing her handicap and leveraging the most useful tool she had remaining: her eyes. Her companion had judged rightly that she would be useless with a Gladius, but not with the gun in her left hand.

Companion
. It was strange to think of this woman in those terms. She had been there that day in the courtyard…the only woman there who was not a slave. She remembered because she had marked the disgust in her eyes and respected it, as she also respected a woman who had risen so high in a profession dominated by men. But she had not known then what the woman would become.

Elizabeth Aurora, Emperor Sullivan’s Chief of Command. Thus far Silent Thunder had not crossed paths with the Imperial Guard, whose movements were confined mostly to the Southern Hemisphere. But the Guard was made up of former Great Army soldiers, and she had had plenty of encounters with their kind. Aurora’s position made her the Derek Blaine of the Conglomerate, and that was not a pleasant association. Just because she hadn’t witnessed the woman’s cruelty first-hand didn’t mean it wasn’t there.

But what was such a high-ranking officer of the Conglomerate doing here, so far from her forces? And how had she ended up in the Silent Thunder camp? Grace felt a significant bulge under Aurora’s shirt—
her
shirt actually, she noticed—that felt like bandages. Coupled with her sharp intake of breath any time Grace shifted her grip across Aurora’s shoulders, she expected the woman was wounded, and badly. As they walked through the camp, Aurora became progressively paler.

Luckily, this section had not yet been hit hard by the enemy. Sounds of the battle reached them from its epicenter in the south, and with every cry and every singing clash Grace felt a pang in her heart. She should be there with them, fighting. Instead she was here, going against the flow of traffic as they attempted to escape. Few paid her any heed. All they saw was a wounded operative being led to safety. In her weakness they did not recognize their commander, for it was more than a woman they followed. It was Shadow Heart, and Shadow Heart did not bleed.

The atmosphere around them changed suddenly, and Grace tensed. The screams shifted from behind them to in front, much louder than anything she had heard thus far, and then she saw them. Five navy-clad Specters rounded the corner of the tent at the end of the row, the white spikes of their Spectral Gladii flashing before them in a storm of fury. Just in the few seconds since Grace had seen them emerge, three had died on the edge of their blades. She tasted bile in her throat.

“We have to do something,” she said.

“There’s nothing we can do,” Aurora replied as she attempted to steer them away from the oncoming Specters. “We are in no condition to fight them.”

“Alone, no,” Grace said, struggling weakly against her. “But together…maybe.”

“This is a job for your operatives, Commander,” Aurora said. “Where are they?”

“They were probably called to the south to engage the Spectorium’s main force and cover the evacuation,” Grace said. “These must be stragglers.”

Aurora hesitated, but after a moment resumed pulling her off the main pathway. Blades sliced the air, and more people died screaming.
Her
people. They were hers to protect, and yet she could not save them. What kind of commander did that make her? What kind of leader could turn his back in the hour of his people’s greatest need? Captains went down with their ships. They didn’t leave their passengers and crew to drown just to save themselves.

The doctor—dead now, she thought with a pang of regret—had explained the surgery and the recovery process clearly. He would go in and apply a special form of
Miracle Heal
directly to her fractured bone, after which the leg had to remain completely immobilized for 48 hours. Whereas before the surgery she could put weight on it with only minimal discomfort, now the leg was all but useless.

But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing I can do
.

Grace released her grip on Aurora and pulled away, which unfortunately left her to fall hard on the cold ground. Aurora cursed and knelt to help her up, but she pushed the woman away, “Just go. I won’t leave my people to die. But I won’t ask you to die, too.” She drew
Novus Vita
and activated its fiery white blade. Aurora stepped away, hand on her own Gladius and eyes wide with distrust.

She’s a bit jumpy, this one
, Grace thought. But she needn’t have worried. Grace deactivated her diamond armor and stuck the point of
Novus Vita
into the ground, using it like a cane to lift her back to her feet. The ground was just hard enough for the blade to support her weight, and she began to walk back toward the action, placing as little weight on the injured leg as possible.

“You’re a fool,” Aurora said to her back. “They’ll kill you just as easily as those people out there. You will die for nothing.”

Grace ignored her. She didn’t expect an officer of the Imperial Guard, trained by Alexander’s World System, to understand. To them, every subordinate’s life was expendable, and if they could not survive in their defense it was acceptable to abandon them. The culture of Silent Thunder was different. Grace had grown up on the stories of Jonathan Charity’s final charge into the Specter Spire. They had gone in knowing they would all probably die, and they had done it to save their comrades and families.

Even at the dome, a small contingent had remained behind to waylay the Great Army and give the rest of the force time to escape into the Wilderness. They had died to the last man. Sacrifice was ingrained in the psyche of every Silent Thunder operative, and so she counted it no loss to give her life in exchange for those people, who otherwise would fall by the edge of a Specter’s blade.

Novus Vita
dug repeatedly into the ground with a dull clink as she emerged back onto the main pathway, where the five Specters continued to drive the fleeing Undocumented like wolves after a herd. Grace planted herself in the middle of the path, a pillar amidst the stampede, and raised the sidearm level with the wolves.

She squeezed the trigger, and the first one went down. The second shot sank into his companion’s left shoulder, and the rest looked at her with wide eyes, shocked that their prey actually had the gall to fight back. The second man was up, holding his shoulder with an angry and murderous expression. But he did not wear it long, for she dropped him with a third bullet.

The remaining three converged on her, the fleeing stampede forgotten, and she squeezed off five more bullets in quick succession. Two disintegrated on the Specter’s blades, and the other three hit their mark in a single body. The Specter fell to his knees with wounds in his shoulder, arm, and gut. But he got back to his feet and kept coming.

Grace pulled the trigger again, but this time all that happened was a click. The magazine was empty. She tossed the worthless weapon aside as the last of her people passed by, leaving her to face the three Specters alone. They paused, eyeing her with cool anger at the loss of their bloodsport, and then spread out to surround her on three sides.

She gripped the hilt of her Gladius tightly and tried to slow the frantic throb of her heart. She would only get one block before being knocked to the ground, and though she would not be completely helpless on her back, it would only be a matter of time.

I did my job
, she thought with a sigh.
I saved those people, at least for now. That’s all that matters
.

The Specters came at her, Gladii blazing, and she drew
Novus Vita
from the ground, reigniting its diamond armor as she raised the blade above her head. The Specter on the right reached her first, and she sacrificed her balance for a powerful downward swing. The Specter blocked the predictable strike easily, and—as expected—Grace fell onto her back. He thrust his weapon down at her, thinking to stab her through the chest, but she knocked the blade away and shot upward for a thrust of her own. Hers hit home and impaled the Specter. She withdrew, leaving his dead body free to fall to the ground. Unfortunately, it landed on her legs. Pain shot up through her wounded shin, and she cried out in frustration. She was pinned.