Текст книги "The Sun Dwellers"

Автор книги: David Estes

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Текущая страница: 19 (всего у книги 21 страниц)

“It was the first time I’d left our subchapter. The train was like a ride, the gray walls whipping by, people hanging onto poles and tucked in rows of small seats. I loved every second of it.

“When we arrived I was shocked at how many women were there. Thousands. The conference was being held under the guise of an annual sewing and homemaking seminar, but it was by invitation only, so only those in the WLM could attend. We sat in a big auditorium with a stage. It was the biggest place I’d ever seen, and I later learned that it was called the Dome.”

Images of the crumbling Dome fill Anna’s head, side by side with her memories from the day of the WLM conference. Oh how things change, and not always for the better. “I have many fond memories of that day,” Anna says wistfully. “Thousands of strong women—fighters—willing to take up a dangerous cause. They did it for their husbands, for their children, for those who had already fought and died. Each and every one of them was a true hero.”

“I felt the same way at the conference that day,” Maia says. “Beautiful speeches by beautiful women. I felt a soaring in my heart like I’d never felt before. But it wasn’t until you spoke that I knew what I wanted.”

“My ‘Now Is the Time’ speech,” Anna says, hearing her own words spoken through her head. “It was definitely one of my best.”

“It was perfect,” Maia says, almost reverently. “You found a way to pour your soul into words and ideas like I’d never heard before. When we returned home, I pleaded with my mom every day to join the WLM, sometimes asking her twenty times a day, until it almost became part of our routine. Wake up. Ask ‘Can I join?’ Mother says ‘No.’ Eat breakfast. ‘Can I join?’ ‘No.’ And so on and so on all day, every day. I learned a lot about my mother’s patience during that time. If I were her, I might have slapped me.”

“She sounds like a special woman.” Anna can’t help but to think of her own mother, Adele’s and Elsey’s grandmother. Another special woman, patient and kind and tougher than anyone ever really knew.

“She was,” Maia says, pursing her lips.

“She passed?” Anna asks.

“Nine years ago. During a special mission for the WLM.”

“She was in the special mission’s corp?”

“Yes. She was recruited six years after I joined the WLM, when I was eighteen. She carried out a number of successful missions, but they were dangerous and it was just a matter of time before bad luck caught up with her.”

“I’m so sorry,” Anna says.

“She died doing what she believed in—for that I’m thankful. We had eight wonderful years together in the WLM. The bond we had during those years was unbreakable.”

“So how did you manage to convince her to let you join when you were only twelve?” Anna asks, still curious as to the beginning of Maia’s evolution from a young, helpless young girl to the strong woman she is today.

“I didn’t,” Maia says, chuckling. “I ambushed her one night at training. There was a break while they set up for hand-to-hand combat. I walked right up to the trainer and asked to join. The look on my mother’s face was priceless, I’ll never forget it, a mixture of wide-eyed shock and unexpected pride. My petition went to WLM leadership and I was allowed in, the only one under sixteen. ‘A special case’ they called it.”

“I’m surprised I don’t remember it,” Anna says, straining to recollect from seventeen years earlier.

“Your name was on the approval form,” Maia says, winking, “although I suspect it was a forgery by one of your assistants.”

Anna laughs, remembering how much she hated paperwork. “You’re probably right. I almost never signed anything, at least not when I could help it.” Her laugh is cut off when the stone at the entrance begins to move.

Chapter Seven

A beam of light cuts through the darkness and into Anna’s eyes, blinding her.

“Move!” Maia hisses, clambering to her feet, dragging Anna after her. Together they move out of the light, against the side wall, as a giant metal claw rolls the stone away, unblocking the entrance to the cellar.

Only the sun dwellers would have technology like that.

This is it.

The last stand. Take out as many of the sun dwellers as possible to make it easier on the others.

Ever so slowly, Anna slips her gun from its holster. Beside her, hobbling on one leg, Maia does the same. Two women, connected by time and circumstance, brought together with a chance to do this one thing for the cause. Two women, capable and strong and ready.

For what?

To die for what they believe in. To die for those they love. To die for good.

But only if someone kills them.

A shadow cuts into the beam of light; footsteps cut into the night. “Anyone down there?” a voice yells out, gruff and no-nonsense.

Anna takes a silent breath, waits.

“I think it’s empty. Give me a sec to check it out,” the grizzly voice says.

As slow footsteps descend the steps, Anna analyzes the situation. Sun dwellers. Opening bunkers and cellars and hideaways. Looking for survivors to kill or capture. Kill any soldiers or civilians who don’t cooperate. Capture all the others. Anna and Maia: definitely on the kill list.

Only one choice: kill or be killed.

Anna sees him now, illuminated by the light, stopped halfway down the staircase. Tall—at least six foot—built sturdy like a tank, wearing a sharp red uniform, unmarked by the nearly uncontested romp through the subchapter.

He peers through the gloom on the opposite side, slides through the lighted area in the middle, and then scans the other side, his eyes passing directly over where Anna can see him, but he can’t see her. Her heart is in her throat, her finger on the trigger, just a twitch away from ending the man’s life. She hesitates, knowing full well that a gunshot will bring a swarm of sun dwellers into the hole. Their only real hope is if he leaves.

He scans back the other way, and then turns, taking one step up. Anna slowly lets out the breath she’s been holding as he takes another step away, a miracle step. A third step washes all the fear away, until he turns, his eyes locking on something.

Anna follows his gaze to where it rests on the ground in the middle of the lighted area, curious as to what has made him pause. It’s exactly where they were previously sitting against the wall.

That’s when she’s notices how dirty the cellar floor was from the explosions and cave-in, a thin layer of dust covering everything.

Everything except where they were sitting, where the outline of two bodies, four legs, and the scrape of their feet as they made their hasty escape, is stark and visible—unmistakable.

He takes a step back into the cellar.

Chapter Eight

Anna’s body is way ahead of her brain. While her mind is still trying to wrap itself around the danger that confronts her, her legs are moving and her fingers are tightening on the butt of her gun.

The soldier reaches the bottom step, his footsteps slow and cautious. But not cautious enough.

She strikes from the shadows to the side, using her weapon like a club, slamming it into the back of his head, where she knows it will have the greatest and fastest effect. As planned, he’s unconscious before he even has time to cry out, his body slumping like a sack of potatoes. Although her arms dart out to catch him, she’s not fast enough and he crumples to the stone, his weapons belt rattling off the bare rock, sounding ominously like the bones of a skeleton rattling in its coffin.

From above, she hears, “Quincey! You comin’ back up or what?”

She has no time to lose—a second could mean the difference of life or death, seeing her daughters again or not. Grabbing the red-clad soldier by his boots at the ankles, she starts to drag him from the light, wishing he wasn’t so well fed. Then she feels Maia beside her, pulling at his arms, helping her get the job done twice as fast.

Back in the shadows, she tries to catch her breath as she reassesses the situation. First off, she was lucky that the wound didn’t bleed too much—no trail of blood will lead the other soldiers to where they’re hiding in the dark. The second thing of importance is that she still doesn’t hear voices above them, which might mean there isn’t a full platoon of sun dwellers ready to charge down and overwhelm them. Which might mean they’ve spread themselves so thinly to search the rubble for survivors hiding in cellars and bomb shelters that there are only a few soldiers in each place.

“Quincey?” the voice yells again from above. It’s the same voice. Perhaps they got really lucky. Perhaps the soldiers are working in pairs, which, of course, would mean they now had the advantage in numbers.

“He’s probably messing with us,” another voice says, this one deeper. “He’s always been a prankster.”

“If he is, I’ll kill him myself,” a third, much raspier voice says. “This isn’t the time for pranks or messing around.”

Three distinct voices change the odds completely.

“What do we do?” Maia says, her lips practically touching Anna’s ear in the dark.

“Follow my lead,” Anna says, unclasping something black and egg-shaped from the fallen soldier’s belt.

Chapter Nine

Before the soldiers are even halfway down the staircase, Anna pulls the pin—one, one thousand, two, one thousand—and throws the grenade, silently praying her aim is true. She doesn’t, however, give herself the advantage of watching its flight; instead, she pushes Maia to the side, throwing her own body over the young girl’s and her arms over her own head.

There’s the distinct clink of metal on stone, but she doesn’t know if she’s hit the far wall, like she intended, or if she inadvertently caught the edge of the stairs, rebounding the handheld explosive device back toward her.

The chatter of automatic gunfire explodes somewhere, bullets zinging and ricocheting off hard rock, distant enough to be safe. And then:

Boom!

The grenade’s explosion is deafening, and although Anna is very much aware that she’s still alive—and therefore, the distance she threw the grenade sufficient—sharp bits of shattered rock sting her as they rain down upon her arms and back, piercing her skin.

Someone cries out in the night—maybe more than one somebody.

Anna waits a moment longer, to be sure she won’t get a jagged splinter of rock in the eye, and then springs to her feet, simultaneously pulling Maia by the crook of her elbow up, too, hoping the young warrior’s ankle will hold up under the frantic pace they’ll have to assume.

Peering through the yellowish haze and dust particles, Anna sees only red. A body to her left, red-suited and limp: the red from his uniform seems to have liquefied, spreading around him on the stone like a dark pool, making it hard to distinguish where he ends and the pool begins. To her right, there’s a nameless soldier, black and red and dead. The third soldier is straight ahead, still alive, clutching the edge of the half-destroyed staircase, as if holding onto it is the only thing he has left—which is probably true. He’s holding on with only one arm, not by choice but out of necessity, as his other arm is lying separately on the ground, between the other two fallen sun dwellers.

Anna knows it was her work that caused this. She’s not proud of this irrefutable fact, but she’s also not ashamed. She did what she had to do. For herself, for Maia, for her family, for the people. I won’t die here. Not now. Although she knows her strong and confident promise is not a predictor of the future—nor has she ever felt one speck of clairvoyance inside her—it gives her comfort to know she’s still fighting.

She steps over the arm, takes aim, and puts a bullet into the back of the guy’s—who’s still clutching the steps like a lifeline—head.

It’s not anger or revenge or even her survival instincts that prompts her actions—no, that’s not it at all. She does it to end his suffering.

Chapter Ten

Three dead, one unconscious. It could have been worse. It could have been them.

Although Anna was initially concerned about Maia—her face was ghost-pale and her fingers trembling as she helped tie up the unconscious guy—she seems okay as she ascends the steps at Anna’s side. Even so, better to check.

“You okay?” Anna says.

“My ankle’s feeling a bit better, I should be fine,” Maia says, glancing down.

“I don’t mean your ankle.”

Maia looks up, makes eye contact for a second, but then returns her gaze to her feet. “Oh.”

“Look, I know that was…violent back—”

“I’ve seen plenty of violence in my life,” Maia interjects. “It isn’t that. You did what you had to do. It’s just…”

Anna stops near the top of the steps, watching the entrance to the cellar carefully for any more unwanted visitors. “It’s just what, Maia?”

“I froze,” Maia says. “I couldn’t have done what you did. I was scared and I just froze up. I thought I was ready for this, but I’m not. What you did, it was incredible.”

“Violence is never incredible,” Anna says, cocking her head to the side when a shot from a rifle cracks in the distance. “But it’s sometimes necessary. No one’s ever ready for it when it comes.”

“Then how do you act when the time comes?” Maia’s question is a simple one, but something tells Anna the answer is vital to the girl’s chances of getting through the next few hours alive.

“Everyone’s different, but what I do is think of all the people who are counting on me to come through for them, the people I want to see again, and I do everything for them. When I threw that grenade I was thinking of how brave Adele is, going to the Sun Realm. When I attacked that guy, Elsey was in my head, how if I didn’t knock him out I might never see her sweet face again.” In any other circumstance, tears might fill Anna’s eyes, but at this time, in this place, Anna’s eyes are dry, so dry they sting a little. She knows that tears are a luxury she can’t afford during war.

“But…I don’t have anyone,” Maia says.

“You have me,” Anna says. “Never forget that.”

She climbs the last two steps, gun drawn, her finger tight on the trigger. Adele and Elsey, and now Maia, swim through her thoughts as she prepares for war.

Chapter Eleven

Each footstep coincides with the slam of her heart against the inside of her chest.

Being outside the cellar again feels strange. She was so certain its four walls were the last she’d ever see, but now, by a stroke of luck or pure will—or fate perhaps—she has a second chance to make her daughters proud.

To her left she spots a threesome of hunting sun dweller soldiers; in their crimson uniforms they look like three smudges of blood on a backdrop of smoky gray. She ducks behind a crumbled wall before they turn her way. Beside her, Maia says, “They’re everywhere. How will we get past them all?”

“We will,” Anna says, fierce determination pulsing through her like an electric charge. “They’re spread out and they don’t expect much resistance.” And little do they know: there’s a few thousand moon dweller soldiers trapped underground, if we can just get them out…

She skates along the wall, the barrel of her gun seeing everything her eyes do, her head on a swivel, her anger rising with each piece of rubble she steps over. Any fear she felt upon ascending from the hell of the cellar is gone, wiped clean inadvertently by the bloody rags of a warring and oppressive government.

Leaving the cover of the wall, she cuts between a pair of crumbling houses, darts across what used to be a residential street, and slips behind another house; this one is still standing, save for its roof, which looks as if it’s been pummeled a dozen times by a wrecking ball. She hears voices nearby.

After glancing at Maia, who seems calmer since leaving the cellar, she heads toward the sound, hopping a wall and galloping across another rubble-strewn backyard. At the next wall she pauses, and then, upon hearing voices, motions toward the other side of the wall: soldiers beyond, her finger says.

She creeps along the wall, moving in between two houses, then hops the wall, immediately flattening herself on the stone sidewalk next to the neighboring house. Maia land softly behind her. The sounds are close—just behind the house.

They tiptoe along the house, until they’re close enough to make out what the voices are saying.

“On your knees!” a deep voice bellows.

“This is our house. You have no right to do this!” a man says.

“Please, Bear, do what they say,” a woman pleads.

“You should listen to your wife,” the deep voice—a sun dweller soldier most likely—advises.

“Marley, these people, they think they can push us around because we let them. Well, no more. I won’t get on my knees. I won’t!”

Thud! A groan of pain. A woman’s scream. “No, no, no! Leave him alone!” Thud, thud, thud, thud! “Stop it! Stop kicking him!”

The sun dweller soldiers are distracted by the beating they’re giving some poor moon dweller. Anna sneaks a peek, sees four red coats, three of which are relentlessly kicking someone on the ground. Big: not the soldiers, the guy getting kicked. Probably why his wife called him Bear—a nickname, most likely.

The fourth soldier stands nearby, supervising. The commanding officer. He’s smiling. Someone needs to change that.

Anna motions to Maia to split up, to circle around to the left while she goes right. Maia’s eyes are wide, but Anna notices that the steeliness has returned. Good timing.

Seeing Maia nod in understanding, she darts out from cover, veers to the right—the distraction. Before anyone sees her, she’s upon the first kicking soldier, pistol whipping him in the back of his head with her gun. The next red-clad bully is too busy stomping on the helpless innocent to notice his buddy’s fall. The CO, however, does notice and starts to say something, “Watch ou—” but is cut off when Maia sticks the cold steel of her gun to his temple. “Don’t move,” she says.

Anna, still moving, kicks high and hard, catching the second soldier in the neck, rocking him to the side and into soldier number three, who is turning, finally realizing something is happening. They go down in a tangled pile, the blood from a wicked gash on soldier two’s forehead streaming down his nose, lips, and neck, mixing with the red of his uniform. He’s clutching his head, his face pale, his mouth contorted in a silent groan of agony.

She levels her gun at his head.

“Who are you?” the CO asks, Maia’s gun still tight against his head.

“We’ll be asking the questions here,” Anna says, keeping one eye on the CO and another on her pile of soldiers. “First one: do you want to die?”

“No, of course not,” the CO grunts. “But in about two seconds, when I’m supposed to check in and I don’t, there will be dozens of soldiers swarming this place, so I suggest you—”

BOOM! The bullet rips into the CO’s thigh, just above the knee. He cries out in pain, topples over, clutches his leg.

Maia stares at Anna, her gun limp at her side. “You—you shot him,” she says.

“He was lying to me,” Anna says, her voice sounding strange and guttural even to her own ears. “I—I had to show him who’s in charge here.” The red-hot anger she felt a moment earlier is ebbing, being replaced by a degree of remorse, something she always feels after inflicting pain on another, even an enemy; it’s something she can’t afford right now. Action is the only remedy.

She thrusts a foot at already-injured soldier two, who tries to block it by throwing his hands over his head. Instead of going high, she stomps on his stomach, earning another groan and the move of his arms from his head to his gut. Lashing out again, this time at his head, she feels the satisfying—and somewhat sickening—thud of her boot off his skull. His head snaps back, cracks into the jaw of soldier number three, who lets out a bloodcurdling howl, and then lolls to the side, his eyes rolling back into their sockets.

Soldier three is clutching his mouth, blood pouring out from between his fingers, his face all scrunched up. “War is hell,” Anna says, bringing her gun down on the crown of his head. He slumps over, unconscious.

Turning to face Maia, her body hot with violence, she says, “Knock him out.”

Maia looks at the CO, back to Anna, says, “Can’t we just tie him up, gag him?”

“He’ll get loose and then he’ll try to kill us. We don’t have time for prisoners, and I don’t believe in killing defenseless soldiers, even ones like these.”

The CO rolls over in the fetal position, his face a shattered mess of pain, his pant leg a darker red than the rest of his uniform. “You already shot me,” he spits out. “Just finish the job.”

“I’m not letting you off that easy,” Anna says. “You’ll pay for your crimes before a war tribunal. Maia?”

Maia takes a deep breath, closes her eyes for just a moment, and then swings her gun like a hammer, whacking the CO sharply across the temple. His writhing stops, his body still with unnatural sleep.

Letting out a deep breath, Maia looks at Anna. “That was horrible,” she says.

“Violence always is,” Anna says.

“You made it look so easy, almost like you enjoyed it.”

Anna cringes. That’s the problem. She was so full of anger at these horrible men that she did sort of enjoy it. She knows she’s flirting with a dangerous line between fighting against evil and joining them. It’s a line she has vowed never to cross.

“She did it for us.” Anna and Maia both jerk to the side, spot the woman, the man’s wife, on her knees, her hands clasped together as if in prayer. “Thank you,” she says. “Thank you so much.”

Her husband stirs, sits up, rubs his head as if clearing his mind from a bad dream. He truly is a giant, with rock-like fists, a chest the size of a beer barrel, and a head twice the circumference of most adult humans. His lip is swollen and fat, one of his eyes bloodshot, painted with black and blue beneath it. But he’s smiling. Smiling at his wife, who’s smiling back at him.

“Oh, Barry!” she cries, clambering to her feet and launching herself at him. She lands on him so hard that, if not for their significant size difference, she might have flattened him.

Maia watches the heartfelt reunion with moist eyes, while Anna watches Maia. She’s so young, full of courage, unmarked by the horrors of life. She silently hopes the war will be over quickly and in their favor, so the innocence and naivety of this girl can persevere for years to come.

She thinks of Adele again, in the belly of the beast, having already endured so much emotional and physical pain, forced to endure more. She hopes her youth hasn’t passed her by these last seven months, when everything changed.

Chapter Twelve

She leaves the rescued moon dweller couple in what she hopes is a safe place—a hidden bomb shelter beneath the floorboards of a shed. It’s a neighbor’s, who had invited Bear and his wife to stay there with them, but they opted instead to remain in their own cellar. A bad choice. But now the kind neighbor welcomes them with open arms and a warm drink, as Anna and Maia seal the trapdoor behind them.

“I’m so glad we got there when we did,” Maia says. “That was amazing seeing their eyes light up when they hugged each other.”

Anna tries to smile, but only manages a thin line. It was a fulfilling rescue, yes, but only a small victory against an enemy set on digging out the city’s residents. With the army barricaded underground, there’s no one to oppose them.

“We have to get to the base,” Anna says.

“It’s not far,” Maia says.

“The way this place is swarming with cockroaches, it’s far enough.”

“We’ll make it.” Now who’s the optimist?

Anna really smiles this time, not hugely, but sincerely. A little shot of hope is just what she needs. “You’re right. We’ll make it.”

They exit the shed, running low to the ground, keeping their heads below walls and crumbling houses. Less than two blocks away is the old church with the underground caverns, where the temporary army base was set up. The once-high steeple no longer stands tall and beckoning. Now fallen, it is but a reminder of what the church used to stand for. From behind a wall, Anna can see that the main church structure—in which stands the primary entrance to the underground tunnels—has imploded upon itself, and now looks more like a raw granite stockyard than a place of worship.

The secondary, hidden entrance to the tunnels was, of course, the one from which Anna and Maia exited, and was destroyed just as they escaped its bounds. She knows her stalwart men and women soldiers will try to dig their way out, perhaps even use small explosives to blast through the blockades, but it will take time. Perhaps if they remove some of the larger blocks from the other end, it will give them a chance to break free. Then the battle will truly begin.

Anna clings to this faint and distant torch of hope as she hops the wall, sprints across a back patio, and ducks behind the next wall. Using this method, the women erase one block from the distance between them and the church. One block to go.

Voices shout through the thick and dusty air, but she’s unable to ascertain their direction or distance. When they fade and don’t return, she leads Maia across the next block, sticking to the shadows and narrow side and rear laneways. Every once and a while she stops to listen for the enemy, tilting her ears in each direction like an animal.

In this manner, they reach the church unseen. Ducking behind a boulder the size of a truck, she surveys the destruction zone.

“Which entrance should we try?” Maia asks.

Given the entire topside of the church collapsed on the primary entrance, the amount of heavy rock and cement is an impenetrable fortress, one made dangerous by shifting rubble and unexpected pockets of empty air. It could take days to dig them out that way.

“Secondary entrance. We’ll be more exposed, but there’s much less blockage.”

Maia nods. “That’s what I was thinking.”

“I’ll go out first,” Anna says. “Just in case someone’s watching the area.” She starts to move out, but Maia puts a hand on her shoulder, stopping her.

“We’re doing this together.”

Anna sighs, half-concerned, half-relieved. “I thought you might say that.”

Chapter Thirteen

The women steal out into the open, their eyes flicking rapidly in every direction. They reach the entrance to the bunker, where the original chunk of stone that blocked their return to the base has been joined by two dozen other smaller hunks of stone shrapnel. Through small gaps in the blocks, Anna determines that half the tunnel has caved in beyond the exterior blockage. Through the muddle of brown and gray rocks, a muffled sound arises: thunk, thunk, thunk.

“They’re there,” she says excitedly. “They’re trying to break through.” A rush of hope flows into her, giving her just the spark of energy she needs. “C’mon, let’s do our part from this side. Start with the small pieces, work our way up to the big ones.”

For a half hour they struggle and strain against the weight of the “small pieces,” which are anywhere from twenty to eighty pounds, some so heavy it takes both of them just to roll them off the pile. Every second Anna expects to hear the chatter of sun dweller gunfire, but it never comes. Removing the next to last of the small stones, she wipes a dirty hand across her dirty forehead, trying to keep the sweat out of her eyes. Maia’s face is equally filthy. “There,” she says, prying off the final manageable chunk and watching it crash from the pile.

Breathing heavily, Anna says, “Now for the big ones. We’ll need to find something to use as a lever.”

Together they search for something—anything—that might give them a chance at success. Anna leads them onto the pile that was once a church, moving slowly to avoid alerting any spying eyes to their presence. Atop the pile, Anna scans the surrounding area, immediately spotting three sets of red uniforms blotted against the drab landscape. The arrogance and stupidity of the sun dwellers as evidenced by their uniforms, she thinks.

“Stay down,” she warns Maia. Together they flatten themselves against the pile until each of the groups move out of sight.

They take turns searching for a lever while the other one keeps watch. Anna’s taking her second turn searching when she sees it. A long, metal pole, decorated with an exquisite brass handle at one end, with beautiful ornamental designs of the Sun, Moon, and Star Realm insignias painted on the side. At the other end is a cap with a bronze cross. The pole was likely used for some ancient ritual involving the salvation of those attending the church. Now it will be used for a similar purpose, she thinks, only this time it will involve the salvation of all of us.

She pulls it from under a boulder, cringing as the steel shrieks along the sharp edge of the stone. “Take this,” she says, feeding the handled end to Maia.

“This is perfect,” Maia says, taking it. With Anna holding the cross-end and Maia the handle, they climb down the pile, returning to the secondary bunker entrance.

They test out the lever on several medium-sized rocks, jamming the cross-end beneath them and using their collective strength to force the loads up and off the pile. With each small victory, Anna’s energy wanes and the steel rod bends more and more. After the sixth rock is removed, she says, “We need to try to remove that big one before us or the pole breaks.”

In agreement, Maia shoves the cross under the largest block of all, the one that originally trapped them on the outside. Taking their positions, Anna on the outside, Maia on the inside, they lean on the steel cylinder, trying to force their entire weight down on the end of the lever.

Nothing.

Gritting her teeth, Anna continues pushing, determined not to let a hunk of rock get the better of her. Finally, it starts to give way, but then—

CRACK! She cries out as the rod gives way beneath her, catapulting her headfirst. She crashes on her shoulder and neck, pain lancing through her back and into her legs. Something falls on her, and she gasps as the air leaves her chest.

“Oomf!” Maia grunts, coming to rest on top of her. “General! Are you okay?” she asks, rolling to the side.

For a minute Anna can’t breathe as she bites at the air, fruitlessly trying to capture it. Then finally: whoosh! She gets a full breath down her throat and her lungs inflate. Panting, she says, “I’m okay, you just knocked the wind out of me, and—”