Though hell, maybe he had it coming. After all, he’d sat on his hands for twenty-seven years without doing a damn thing. He’d cowered behind brazen indifference, and it’d taken his own father’s death to snap him out of it, for fuck’s sake. Maybe he really was the bad guy.
A high-pitched voice shouted through the din, angry. Emery, maybe? He tried to peel his blistering eyes open but the pain grew all-consuming.
He poured all of his efforts into focusing on keeping his royal Imprints inactive. He became vaguely aware of boots impacting his stomach, over and over—deep, thudding blows in the meat of his guts. The strikes themselves didn’t hurt, as his nerves were already overloaded with the pain of the activated obsidian Imprints. But he knew the beating would hurt later, assuming they didn’t intend to kill him. So he tried to clutch at his stomach, protect it as much as he could with his forearms, until someone turned him over and held his wrists down. Then fists joined in.
He didn’t fight back, he just waited for it to end, doing his best to deflect as many of the impacts as he could. He just had to hold out.
Although … what was he holding out for, exactly? Rake had left. Jackin and Warner had left. Puck sat glued to a screen in the control room, trying to save everyone’s lives. Mesa would never be able to stop brutes like this. No one was coming to save him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Adequin pulled herself up the last few rungs of the access ladder into one of the secondary passages of the Tempus’s command deck. More corpses littered the corridor and her breath caught in her throat. Fewer than half were Drudgers.
A few meters away, Erandus crouched over one of the human bodies, his fingers pressed firmly under their jaw. He shook his head then let out a soft sigh, shifting to unhook the soldier’s dog tags.
A sharp prickle ran down Adequin’s spine as her eyes drifted over each of the twelve fallen Sentinels, small holes scoured into the fronts of their navy vests from clean, close plasma fire straight to the chest. All but three still had their knives sheathed and pistols holstered. They’d been caught off guard.
And why wouldn’t they have been?
The Tempus was a scouting vessel in name only, and nothing more than a flying repair kit in reality. The crew’s endless cycle of struggling to keep a two-hundred-year-old alert system in working order while micromanaging meager supplies meant readiness drills weren’t even part of the regimen anymore. In all likelihood, no one on the crew had seen combat training in years. She’d failed them in that regard too.
Griffith grunted, and she tore her gaze back down to the ladder, offering him a hand up out of the hatch. She hauled him up and her Imprints brought a metallic surge to her tongue, morphing into a sulfurous, bitter taste as it mixed with the acid that’d risen from her stomach.
He exhaled as he straightened his back, then stood unmoving for a few long moments, eyes drifting slowly over his fallen crew. He ran a stiff hand over his mouth, then blew out a long breath before moving forward to join Erandus. He knelt beside the oculus and began to quietly speak under his breath.
She could only catch a few syllables, but didn’t have to hear any of it to know what he recited—a traditional Cautian elegy, used by nonsecular and atheists alike. Countless times during the Resurgence, she’d stood beside him as he spoke those words for their fallen comrades—far too many times. She’d hoped to never hear them again.
A dense pressure rose in her chest, and she found it difficult to catch her breath. Not from memories of the war, but because she hadn’t once thought to offer any kind of parting words or last rites for the Argus’s crew. For Lace, for Bray, for the hundreds of others she’d left behind.
As heat rose to her face, she had to close her eyes and remind herself it was far from over. The time would come to mourn the dead, to pay homage to those they’d lost. For now, she had to focus on finding a way to make sure they didn’t add themselves to the list of casualties.