The Society (A Broken World Book 1) (34 page)

The top of my rifle slammed into the wall next to me a fraction of a second before the magazine clicked into place inside the receiver. The wall provided the resistance I'd needed, did what I couldn't bring myself to do.

I released the bolt, driving a new round into the chamber with a flick of my thumb, and then fired off a three-round burst, aiming blindly behind me at the swordsman who had just impaled me. I shouldn't have been able to hear anything—not after so much sustained gunfire—but the sound of his body hitting the ground was undeniable. Even more welcome was the fact that the tension on the sword disappeared as he let go of it—a fraction of a second before he would have ripped it free and sealed my fate.

I turned, rolling along the wall through half of a revolution, and then gunned down the last four enforcers in quick succession. I would have already fallen if not for the support the wall offered, but even with that extra help, it was all I could do to get far enough around to take in the rest of the room.

The women had scattered in an effort to get out of the line of fire, but I wasn't concerned about them. Most of them were victims, but saving them wouldn't change the bigger picture. Saving Brennan very well might. If I could get him out, there was a very real chance that he could transform the city into something else, into a place where girls even younger than me didn't have to sell themselves into prostitution.

I found Brennan after just a second or two of searching, but that just confused me. I must have lost even more blood than I'd realized. My vision was starting to go a little blurry, but it almost looked like Brennan was standing now, no longer tied to the steel beam.

Piter was standing behind him, knife to his throat, but even that wasn't the most surprising thing. Brennan's shirt was open, and there were dozens of signs of the abuse he'd suffered at Piter's hands over the last twenty-four hours, but there were no bandages, no steel brace with rods running into his ribs, nothing to indicate that just a few days before he'd been at death's doorstep.

"Put your gun down. You're obviously just seconds from falling over, and I still hold all of the cards. As long as I hold Brennan, you can't do anything to me."

Piter's voice distracted me from Brennan's inexplicable recovery. I wanted my questions answered, but I forced myself to focus on the most important things, the things that had brought me this far.

"I'm not going to let you walk out of here with Brennan as a hostage, Piter. I know how that scenario plays out. Nothing we could give you would ever convince you to give him up."

"My freedom—"

"No. There's no way for me to guarantee that you'll release him once you cross over the border to your nearest ally. You can let him go and I'll still give you a head start, or I kill you. There is no third option."

"Don't lie to me, whore. I saw how you looked at him. You love Brennan, you're not going to risk killing him. Maybe you've been lying to yourself all this time, but you can't lie to me. If you want to guarantee Brennan's safety then put the barrel of your gun in your mouth and pull the trigger. With you out of the way, I won't have any reason to hurt Brennan—he's more valuable to me alive than dead."

"Don't do it, Skye!"

The sound of Brennan's voice gave me a lifeline to cling to. Piter had pulled the gag away from Brennan's mouth, probably expecting him to beg me to kill myself to save him. Piter stuck the point of his knife a quarter of an inch into Brennan's neck.

"Not another word out of you, Brennan. As for you,
Skye
, don't listen to him. He's nothing more than an idealist. You and I know better than that. You're already dead. Frankly I'm surprised that you're still able to stand. Every heartbeat pushes more of what little blood you have left out of your body. All you would be doing is hurrying along the inevitable."

"Maybe, but I don't have to stop you, Piter. All I have to do is delay you long enough for the rest of my team to get here."

I hoped it was true. The gunfire from below us had started to die out, but there was no way to be sure if that was because Jasper and the others had managed to cut down their opposition or if they'd run out of ammunition.

"You're mistaken, Skye, time is most definitely on my side. You're going to die, but if you make me wait for one second longer, I'll cut off his hands when I finally get to safety. Kill yourself and save him—isn't that a small sacrifice for love?"

The sights on the top of my rifle seemed to be moving around independently of my will. I was much too weak to keep the rifle steady enough to guarantee a shot. Even if I'd been stronger, taking a shot at Piter would have still been risky. After slamming the top of my rifle against the wall like I'd just done, it was virtually guaranteed that the sights were no longer lined up. I'd managed to mow down those last few enforcers, but that had been at extremely close range.

Two futures stretched out before me, and it took me only a second to choose one. I held my breath as the barrel of my rifle moved, and then I stroked the trigger and put all three rounds into Piter's head—the only target I had with so much of his body hidden behind Brennan.

"I guess I'm not willing to sacrifice myself for someone else after all."

It was an impossible shot, but I managed it and then fell to my knees, rifle dropping from hands too weak to hold it. My reality went fuzzy for a time. I lost at least several seconds, maybe as much as a minute, but the next thing I knew Brennan was kneeling next to me.

"I've got to get this sword out of you, Skye."

It felt like the words were coming to me from the top of a deep hole. It was hard to summon up the energy required to respond, but somehow I managed.

"Can't—it will just speed up the bleeding. Piter was right, I'm a dead woman. It's just a matter of time now."

Brennan reached over and picked up my rifle. I thought for a second that he was going to deliver a mercy blow and put me out of my misery, but he simply pointed it at a set of windows and fired off a long burst of bullets that drained the clip dry.

"Don't, Brennan. You're going to need—"

I wanted to finish the sentence, wanted to tell him that he was probably going to need that ammunition to fight his way down to Jasper and the others, but my strength was gone. I watched numbly as Brennan ran over to two of the first enforcers I'd shot after leaving the stairwell—the two who'd been carrying the last of Piter's rifles.

Brennan ripped one of the magazines out of the rifles on the floor and jammed it into my rifle before turning and emptying the entire magazine out into the night. The magazine from the second rifle was likewise discharged, and then Brennan was running back toward me.

"This is going to hurt, Skye, but we don't have any other options."

Before I could ask him what he meant, he pulled the sword out of my back and jammed the super-heated barrel of my rifle into the wound. The pain as my wounds were cauterized was nearly enough to force me unconscious, but he slapped me.

"Don't close your eyes! You've got to stay awake."

I tried to tell him that he was asking too much, that there wasn't any point in continuing to fight, but the words wouldn't come out.

A second later he picked me up and slung me over his shoulder. "Stay with me, Skye. I saw a couple of spare magazines on the two guys you shot. Let me get them and then we'll get out of here."

I lost some more time. I'd wanted to surrender to the blackness, but Brennan had asked me not to—apparently that was enough to make me keep fighting. There was no way of telling if I failed and that was why time got fuzzy, or if my mind had just been pushed too far, but all I got over the next hour or so were flashes, images and bits of sound.

We were going down a set of stairs, surrounded by Jasper and two other guys. We were passing an endless parade of fires burning in decaying oil drums. Brennan turned around and for a brief moment I saw the barricade in all of its jury-rigged glory. There was yelling—signs and countersigns—and then someone was laying down covering fire from above.

My nanites must have finally been getting on top of the damage by that point, because I started sticking around for more of the journey after that. I saw Victoria and the first few of her people come through the barricade as Brennan carried me deeper into his territory.

I knew that he wanted to stay and help with the fighting, wanted to stay at the barricade providing cover fire until all of Victoria's surviving people made it to safety, but he didn't—because getting me medical help was even more important to him than all of that.

By the time that we made it to the compound I was recovered enough to speak, but there was too much commotion as Brennan ordered half of the remaining guards off of the wall to join the fighting on the southern border.

He delayed for just long enough to make sure that his orders were being followed and then continued on toward the headquarters building—carrying me across his shoulder, completely unconcerned about the fact that he didn't have any bodyguards, anyone to help stop an attack if some disgruntled employee like Jerome saw him.

"Brennan, this isn't safe."

"Nothing is safe, Skye. I've been telling myself that for years, but I didn't really believe it until Piter's men grabbed me—not down in my gut. Maybe you're right, maybe I should have brought a couple of guards along, but then I would have been taking away three of us who should have stayed at the barricade and helped out Victoria's people. I couldn't justify pulling others off too—not just to protect me."

"Then why didn't you stay there too?"

"Because the only thing worse than betraying the people who depend on me is the thought of watching you die. I'm getting you to Tyrell if it kills me. After everything you've done for me it's the least I can do."

I tried to struggle, but I was just too weak to make him put me down. "No, Brennan. You have it all wrong. You were the one who saved me."

"You need to stop moving around, Skye. Once you're better I'll give you anything you want—anything that's within my power to give—but until then you're going to hold still until Tyrell gives you a clean bill of health. It would kill me if anything happened to you."

I would have kept arguing, but somehow we'd arrived at the secure entrance to the headquarters building and Brennan was setting me down on a stretcher just outside the door. I looked up into the night sky and saw something that made my blood run cold.

There were lights high above the city, lights that shouldn't have been there. They weren't contained fires positioned at the top of one of the skyscrapers, they were electric lights mounted to one of the Society mobile command centers.

That could only mean one thing.

Everyone in the city was going to die.

Chapter 26

Despite my best efforts, I briefly lost consciousness as we headed down the stairs. When I came back to, I was on a hard metal table in my room, but I wasn't alone. Brennan was there with Tyrell, and the pair of them were deep in conversation.

"I'm pretty sure that she's going to recover—it looks like you got the bleeding stopped in time—but I don't know if it's going to make any difference, Brennan. Now that the ants have moved one of their mobile command centers overhead it's entirely possible that none of us will make it out of here alive."

Tyrell sounded remarkably calm for someone discussing the likelihood of his death. It didn't make any sense—there was a thread there that I was missing—but Brennan responded before I could home in on it.

"Yes, I know. I saw it too, several hundred tons of superweapon floating so high above us that nothing we have could possibly bring it down. It's ironic—two hundred years ago that thing would have been nothing more than a giant deathtrap, but now it's untouchable, a giant blimp that floats over to the next target the Betrayer wants destroyed and then drops tungsten rods from so high up that they hit with the destructive power of a nuclear weapon. All of the damage, none of the radioactive fallout.

"You're sure that Katya isn't going to be able to get us out this time?"

"I'm afraid so. I haven't heard from her since the transmission telling us to expect the arrival of a covert operative. I suspect that she's either been captured or been forced to go to ground."

"Does Jax know?"

"Not the specifics, but enough to realize just how much trouble we have headed our direction. He's got a bone to pick with you, by the way."

"I know—he's right, too. I took too many risks and it nearly cost us ten years of work. I guess I was just so focused on the ants that I forgot about the smaller threats."

My eyes were still closed—if I was going to figure out what they were talking about, I needed to keep them from realizing that I was awake—but it sounded like one of them leaned in closer to the other and whispered something too faint for me to make out.

Desperate to hear what they were saying, I held my breath, hoping that would make a difference, but that still wasn't enough to turn the whispers into something intelligible. After several seconds I gave up and sucked in the air that my body was so insistently demanding.

Breathing deeply sent a stabbing pain through my side where I'd been stabbed. Apparently the nanites were having a hard time dealing with all of the cauterized flesh.

I gasped from the pain and Brennan was at my side a second later. "Skye, are you okay?"

It was time to play up my injuries. A normal person probably wouldn't be conscious for another day or two at least. I needed to throw the two of them off my scent—make them think that I was going to spend the next two days unconscious so that I would have a chance to get out and do the things that I knew needed to be done.

I nodded sleepily. "Yeah, I just breathed funny and it hurt."

"I'd tell you to stop breathing, but I'm worried that you would take me seriously. Tyrell is going to give you something for the pain—do you need anything else?"

I started to shake my head tiredly, and then stopped and opened my eyes, blinking like it was all I could do to keep them from closing again. "You said I could have anything I want?"