Page 73 of The Endless War

“The devil?”

Keris frowned, the fog that had taken hold of his brain clearing. “Bermin, you jackass. Petra doesn’t need a martyr to bolster her cause.”

“Good thinking.” Aren pounded him on the back, then pressed ahead. “Saam? Where do we stand?”

It was Zarrah’s voice that responded.

“Bermin’s force is regrouping,” she called out of the darkness. “Look, you can see the torches. They’ll move around the spiral, and we need to stay ahead of them. We cannot linger.”

“She’s right,” Daria said. “There will be no mercy if we’re caught, only slaughter. We need to cross the next bridge.”

“The next bridge will be guarded,” Aren said, “and there’s every chance they’ll cut the ropes if they see us coming.”

“Then we keep going around the spiral,” Zarrah suggested.

“More than half my people are injured,” Daria answered. “We can’t move fast enough.”

Keris walked toward their voices, his eyes drifting over the dark shadows huddled on the ground, the air thick with moans of pain and terrified weeping. Children weeping.

He moved closer, recognizing Zarrah’s shadow by the way she moved, his chest constricting because she was so near and yet still so far.

“The remaining guards at the pier will have heard the horns,” Aren said. “They’ll know that things didn’t go as Bermin intended and will have signaled the navy. We have to get to the pier before those ships do, or they’ll drive my ship off.”

The debate continued, and rather than subjecting himself to the growing certainty that they’d escaped from the frying pan and moved into the fire, Keris walked around the mass of people, heading alone up the pathway to the next bridge.

He increased his stride, the noise of argument and the moans of the injured fading behind him, and he looked up at the sky. With no torchlight, the stars were a sea of brilliant sparks. Stories of the past, if you believed the Cardiffians, and he wondered if new stories were ever added. Wondered if the skies above would change to tell the story of this moment where they’d come so close to escape only to fail.

Probably not.

The path rose up a slope, and he paused at the summit to survey the bridge that sat a hundred yards away. With the injured in their ranks, the bridge was the fastest route to get everyone acrossto the steps leading down to the pier, but judging from the glowing torches and mass of gathered soldiers on the far side, they’d get no farther.

Climbing onto a large rock, Keris sat unmoving, and in the darkness and silence, he heard familiar footsteps approach.

SHE LEFTDARIAand Aren engaged in an argument over what they should do while others tended to the wounded, preparing them to move. She needed to be away from the noise of too many commanders and not enough soldiers, something she’d experienced often in her career. It never turned out well.

Strange as it might seem to some, the battle had given her peace, for it had driven away all thought beyond the fight. Given her clarity of purpose that was now seeping away with what lingered of her adrenaline as she faced the direness of their situation.

Keris had come for her.

He was here.

They were together.

And yet she still felt a thousand miles away from him.

Her breathing accelerated, her mind struggling to sort through the violent twist of emotions. Failing, because she felttoomuch, parts of her at war with themselves so that it felt like she was slipping into madness.

“Breathe,” she told herself. “Focus on getting off this island alive.”

Wasted words. She wasdrowningin emotion. Zarrah had prepared for a thousand moments on this island, but not one of them had been how she’d react to being back in Keris’s presence, because she’d believed what her aunt had said. That he wasn’t coming.

But he had.

Keris was here, and Zarrah wasn’t sure if she wanted to throw herself into his arms or run as far and fast from him as she could.

Enough!She bit down on the insides of her cheeks hard enough that she tasted blood.Focus.

Pausing at the crest of the small slope, Zarrah used the cover of darkness to observe their next obstacle. This was what her mind needed to devote itself to. Coming up with a plan to get as many people as possible off this island alive.

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