Deception (6 page)
Nothing.
It’s as if the army traveling through the Wasteland has disappeared.
Or as if they’re lying in wait. Assessing their target. Watching for the perfect moment to attack.
I figure that perfect moment is going to be the instant Logan and I step out of the tree line.
A twig snaps somewhere behind us, a loud crack that has Logan reaching for his sword even as I spin around, searching for movement.
Everything is still.
“They must be getting into position,” Logan breathes against my ear. “We have to go.”
I turn back around and stare at the heap of ruined stone that marks the entrance to the city. Gulping in deep breaths of air, I wipe the sweat from my face and nod.
The gate is fifty yards ahead of us, facing west into the Wasteland. We can move out of the trees, race across the flat land separating us from the corner of the Wall, and then run along it until we reach the entrance. A movement catches my eye, and I see Thom’s wide shoulders beside Drake’s smaller frame as they pace along the top of the Wall beside the opening, guarding the entrance from predators they didn’t really think would come.
“Let’s go,” I say, and run out of the trees, Logan on my heels.
We’ve covered half the distance between the tree line and the Wall when the entire western edge of the Wasteland explodes into motion. Wave after wave of soldiers dressed in red and gold pour out of the trees, swords drawn, and charge the city.
“Blow the gate!” Logan yells.
For a moment, I think Drake will do it. He and Thom disappear off the top of the Wall, and we wait for an explosion that never comes. Instead, Willow vaults over the pile of rubble, arrows already flying from her bow. Thom, Drake, Quinn, Ian, Frankie, and five others rush after her, swords gleaming in the dying rays of the sun, and create a small perimeter around the entrance.
“No!” I scream as I run for the gate. They’re going to die. All of them. At least twenty soldiers are already closing in, with hundreds more behind them. Trying to fight them off is suicide.
“Blow the gate.” Logan runs beside me, his sword out.
“Blow the gate!”
The first wave of soldiers crashes into the tiny band of survivors and the scream of metal against metal shivers through the air. Two of our men go down immediately. Quinn, weaponless, spins with terrifying speed, swiping the legs out from underneath soldiers and kicking their weapons away. Willow’s arrows slam into the attackers, though her aim seems to be off, as most of those who get hit keep rushing forward. Thom grips a sword in one beefy hand and a thick, jagged board in the other. He swings both like he’s felling a tree. Ian and Frankie stand back- to-back, their swords flashing in the sunlight.
They’re fighting with skill and courage. The small opening into the city works to our advantage as the fighting between our people and theirs creates a barrier the other soldiers can’t penetrate or flank. But already our people are showing signs of exhaustion. And it doesn’t matter how many soldiers go down, more just keep coming.
We’re twenty yards from the gate when we reach the army’s fringe. I swing the weighted end of my Switch into a soldier’s knee and leap over him as he falls. Logan slams into another man, and their swords clash. We lunge, swing, hack, and parry with the Wall at our backs, and slowly gain ground toward the gate.
We’re still ten yards away and tiring fast when a group of soldiers breaks through the perimeter as another one of our men falls to the ground. Ignoring those fighting around them, the soldiers crawl over the gate’s wreckage and swarm inside Baalboden.
“Drake!” Logan’s voice, furious and desperate, rises above the sound of battle. “Do it before it’s too late!”
“Not without you two,” Drake yells, his dark eyes lit with a fervor that turns his mild, ordinary face into something dangerous as he swings his sword into every red-and-gold uniform he can see.
I take a sharp blow to my shoulder and spin into the side of the Wall. The stone scrapes my skin as my breath leaves my body. Pain rips a path from my shoulder to my jaw. I turn my face to look at my attacker as he whips his sword toward my neck.
Instantly, I drop to the ground, feeling the sword slice the air above me as I fall. My Switch is useless now. Too long and too heavy to do any damage unless I can gain some leverage. With my back to the Wall and my attacker directly in front of me coming in for another blow, leverage isn’t one of my options.
I dive forward, slam into his knees, and reach for my knife when he staggers back a step. He raises his sword. I press one hand into the ground for balance and gather myself. His sword flashes through the air, and I roll to the left, my knife hand slashing as I go.
The sword whistles past my head. I leap to my feet, and he lunges toward me on legs suddenly too weak to hold him. I follow his gaze as he stares down at the deep cut on his thigh, at the blood gushing out of his artery with every beat of his heart. Before he falls to his knees, I’m already gone. Scooping up my Switch, I battle to cross the last few yards between me and the gate.
Willow stands on top of the rubble, firing arrows at the soldiers who’ve climbed into the city. Quinn holds the ground below his sister, disarming those who try to reach her. He fights with lethal precision. Like a machine whose sole function is to reduce grown men to nothing.
Thom, Drake, Ian, and the two remaining Baalboden men aren’t faring as well. They’re backed against the Wall, cut off on all sides by soldiers, and the space between them and the teeth of the soldier’s swords is steadily shrinking. Even as I watch, a soldier plunges his sword into the chest of the man beside Thom, and the man drops to the ground.
I slam my Switch into a soldier standing between me and Drake, then slice my knife across his neck as he turns. Blood spurts, and I stagger back as it arcs toward me. Logan leaps over the fallen man, his sword dripping, and together we shove our way to Drake’s side.
Soldiers press around us from all sides, herding us toward the city’s entrance.
I hope Logan planned for this, too.
“Get inside,” he says, and our men scramble across the rubble while Willow fires two more arrows into the soldiers surrounding us.
“Time to go,” she says, and leaps into the city.
Logan climbs after her, already yelling orders to whoever is on the other side of the gate to kill the soldiers who broke through or get out of the way and let him do it himself. In seconds, he’s over the other side.
I grab for a handhold in the pile of steel and stone, but someone behind me wraps a fist around my hair and yanks me back. The soldier holding my hair pulls me against him, trapping my Switch with his sword arm in a movement so fluid and fast, I don’t even register it until I’m already at a disadvantage. The soldiers around me step back, and a sudden silence falls across the field.
“Rachel Adams!”
My name, cut into bite-size syllables, echoes through the air, coated in fury. I know that voice. Terror and rage battle for control over my body. My limbs are too heavy. My head is too light. A distant roaring fills my ears as the soldier holding me pivots toward the Wasteland, and I see Commander Jason Chase, our former leader and the man who singlehandedly destroyed my family and my world, riding toward me on a large brown horse.
RACHEL
T
he Commander glares at me with palpable hatred.
My pulse thunders against my ears as I glare right back.
A slew of Baalboden guards dressed in crisp blue military jackets with shining silver buttons step out of the Wasteland and form ranks behind their leader.
We aren’t facing one army, we’re facing two.
Whose army is the Commander borrowing? I rack my brain, running through what I know of the southeastern city-states. All allied with the Commander. All places my father refused to bring me for fear one of the Commander’s many spies would mention the presence of Jared Adams’s daughter when I was supposed to be meekly learning domestic arts at home in Baalboden.
Red-and-gold uniforms. Horses. Carrington? Schoensville? I can’t remember which of them uses red uniforms—a tremendously stupid color to wear while traveling through the Wasteland since it offers zero camouflage—and it doesn’t matter. What matters is that the Commander is coming closer, and I’m still pinned.
I need to be free of this soldier before the Commander reaches me, or I’m dead. I’m not about to die without taking the Commander with me.
“You took something of mine,” he says, his dark eyes burning while the thick scar that bisects his face pulls at his mouth.
The dull ache of missing Oliver and Dad throbs beneath my breastbone, and then slowly sinks into the icy silence that bloomed inside of me while I was lying on my father’s grave.
The Commander can’t hurt me if I refuse to feel it.
I let the memory of Dad and Oliver dissolve my terror and straighten my spine. Raising my chin, I tighten my grip on my knife while I say, “You took something of mine, too.”
His laugh is a bitter poison spilling from his lips. “I suppose you think we’re even now, you foolish girl.”
Soldiers step aside as the horse comes closer. I have forty yards before he reaches me. Maybe less. My knife is a reassuring weight in my left hand. I lower my arm, and the soldier holding me tightens his grip. I flip my knife blade around and aim for what I hope is the artery in his thigh.
I’m only going to get one chance at this.
Meeting the Commander’s eyes, I raise my voice and speak as clearly as possible. “We won’t be even until you lie dead at my feet.”
A faint
thwing
disturbs the air, and an arrow flies past me to bury itself in the Commander’s chest. I don’t know whether to celebrate that someone—most likely Willow—had such excellent aim or to be sorry that I didn’t get to destroy him myself.
I don’t get the chance to decide because the Commander sneers, reaches for the arrow, and yanks it free. I stare at his chest, waiting for the blood to come.
Willing
it to come, but it doesn’t.
He’s wearing armor. Only one city-state equips its soldiers with armor, which means the soldiers in red must be Carrington, and any blows we aim at their chests will be useless. No wonder Willow’s arrows had such little effect on the attackers.
“Aim at his head!” I scream.
The Commander throws the arrow onto the ground and spurs his horse forward. Willow doesn’t fire again. Either she’s out, or she has her hands full defending the survivors inside the Wall from the soldiers who overran the gate. Either way, I’ve got seconds before the Commander reaches me. Seconds to get free of the soldier who pins me, release the blade at the end of my Switch, and prepare to kill the Commander or die trying.
I jab the knife into the soft meat of the soldier’s leg, and he stiffens, his grip on my Switch arm loosening slightly. Before he can recover, I snap my head back, smashing my skull into his nose. Bright lights dance at the edge of my vision as I crush his instep with my boot and whirl around, my Switch already swinging for his head.
He lunges forward, blocking the Switch with his sword while blood pours from his nose, and then balls up his fist to punch me in the face. I whip my knife arm up to block him, but someone hurtles through the air and knocks the soldier to the ground.
Quinn sits astride him, his dark hair flying in the wind as he wrenches the man’s sword arm into an impossible angle. The soldier screams in agony as the sickening crack of a bone ripping apart from its tendons fills the air. I jump over them, grip my Switch, and face the Commander. I’ll have to unseat him from his horse. A slice across the back of his knee followed by a blow to his chest should do it. Once he’s on the ground, I’ll attack quickly and without mercy. Just the way he taught me.
“Rachel, get inside the city!” Quinn snaps at me, but I can barely hear him past the pounding of my pulse.
Fifteen yards. Fifteen yards and the Commander is mine. His dark eyes mock me as he reaches for his sword. He thinks he can crush me beneath the hooves of his horse like I’m nothing.
Like the ones he took from me were nothing.
Hatred is steel running through my blood, and it feels like courage. I lift my Switch and keep my knife pressed close to my body, ready to slash the back of his knee at the last moment.
Ten yards. I call up the memory of my father’s face and hold it steady.
Eight yards.
Strong hands wrap around my waist from behind and lift me off of the ground.
“No!” I wrench myself to the left, trying to break free, but the hands just clamp down harder. “Let me go!”
Seven yards.
“You aren’t sacrificing yourself today,” Quinn says, and hauls me toward the pile of rubble that covers the entrance to Baalboden.
“That’s not your choice.” I elbow him, but he won’t relent, and I don’t want to fight hard enough to hurt him. “Quinn, that’s not your choice.”
Six yards.
Quinn’s hands loosen. “Then I’ll fight with you.”