“Where’s Adam?”
I shake my head. Shrug.
“Do you think we’ll find him?” she asks, her voice practically a whisper.
I look up.
There’s a yearning there—something more than general concern in her tone. I turn fully to meet her eyes, but she won’t look at me.
She’s suddenly blushing.
“I don’t know,” I say to her. “I hope so.”
“Me too,” she says softly.
She rests her head on my shoulder. We stare out, into the distance. Let the silence devour our bodies.
“You did an amazing job, by the way.” I nod at the valley below. “This is beautiful.”
Alia really outdid herself. She and Winston.
The monuments they designed are simple and elegant, made from stone sourced from the land itself.
And there are two.
One for the lives lost here, at the Sanctuary, two days ago. The other for the lives lost there, at Omega Point, two months ago. The list of names is long. The injustice of it all roars through me.
Alia takes my hand. Squeezes.
I realize I’m crying.
I turn away, feeling stupid, and Alia lets go, gives me space to pull myself together. I wipe at my eyes with excessive force, angry with myself for falling apart. Angry with myself for being disappointed. Angry with myself for ever allowing hope.
We lost J.
We’re not even sure exactly how it happened. Warner has been virtually comatose since that day, and getting information out of him has been near impossible. But it sounds like we never really stood a chance, in the end. One of Anderson’s men had the preternatural ability to clone himself, and it took us too long to figure it out. We couldn’t understand why their defense would suddenly double and triple just as we thought we were wearing them down. But it turns out Anderson had an inexhaustible supply of dummy soldiers. Warner couldn’t get over it. It was the one thing he kept repeating, over and over— I should’ve known, I should’ve known
—and despite the fact that Warner’s been killing himself for the oversight, Castle says it was precisely because of Warner that any of us are still alive.
There weren’t supposed to be any survivors. That was Anderson’s decree. The command he gave after I went down.
Warner figured out the trick just in time.
His ability to harness the soldier’s powers and use it against him was our one saving grace, apparently, and when the dude realized he had competition, he took what he could get and ran.
Which means he managed to snag an unconscious Haider and Stephan. It means Anderson escaped.
And J, of course.
It means they got J.
“Should we head back?” Alia says quietly. “Castle was awake when I left. He said he wanted to talk to you.”
“Yeah.” I nod, get to my feet. Pull myself together. “Any update on James, by the way? Is he cleared for visitors yet?”
Alia shakes her head. Stands up, too. “Not yet,” she says. “But he’ll be awake soon. The girls are optimistic. Between his healing powers and theirs, they feel certain they’ll be able to get him through it.”
“Yeah,” I say, taking a deep breath. “I’m sure you’re right.”
Wrong.
I’m not sure of anything.
The wreckage left in the wake of Anderson’s attack has laid all of us low. Sonya and Sara are working around the clock. Sam was severely injured. Nazeera is still unconscious. Castle is weak. Hundreds of others are trying to heal.
A serious darkness has descended upon us all.
We fought hard, but we took too many hits. We were too few to begin with. There was only so much any of us could do.
These are the things I keep telling myself, anyway.
We start walking.
“This feels worse, doesn’t it?” Alia says. “Worse than last time.” She stops, suddenly, and I follow her line of sight, study the scene before us. The torn-down buildings, the detritus along the paths. We did our best to clean up the worst of it, but if I look in the wrong place at the wrong time, I can still find blood on broken tree branches. Shards of glass.
“Yeah,” I say. “Somehow, this is so much worse.”
Maybe because the stakes were higher. Maybe because we’ve never lost J before. Maybe because I’ve never seen Warner this lost or this broken. Angry Warner was better than this. At least angry Warner had some fight left in him.
Alia and I part ways when we enter the dining tent. She’s been volunteering her time, going from cot to cot to check on people, offering food and water where necessary, and this dining tent is currently her place of work. The massive space has been made into a sort of convalescent home. Sonya and Sara are prioritizing major injuries; minor wounds are being treated the traditional way, by what’s left of the original staff of doctors and nurses. This room is stacked, end to end, with those of us who are either healing from minor injuries, or resting after major intervention.