Page 60 of Land of Shadow

“That’s not the only thing that happened.” Gretchen is behind me, and I feel her fingers in my hair. “You have a goose egg back here.”

Aang’s been bitching in the background, but finally he comes this way, his voice growing louder. “Did you see that? Her bedroom is bigger than my entire place. This is—holy shit, is thathim?” He stops short and stares at Valen.

Valen turns around, his face in full-on scowl mode, then stalks from the apartment without so much as a word.

“What the fuck?” Aang plops down in the seat across from me and stares at where Valen had been standing. “Like seriously, what the fuck? He just hangs out here?”

“He’s my liaison on the cure. The blood. All the—” I wave my hand in a vague motion. “The stuff.”

“Liaison with who? He reports to someone?” Evie asks gently as Gretchen rolls around to my front and inspects my face.

I don’t know how much to tell them. Of course this isn’t the first time they’ve asked me about Valen and his people, but back then I didn’t have any answers. Now I do. But they aren’t safe to share.

“Yeah, my sister,” I lie.

Aang arches a dark brow. “Can’t she just ask you herself?”

“She’s busy. Valen is the one who brings the samples, so it’s just easier if I tell him our findings—well, our lack of findings—and he … you know, he writes up the report.” I try to imagine Valen sitting at a computer and writing a report.Unnerving.

“Forget that. Tell us what happened.”

Wyatt appears with a first aid kit in one hand. “Figured we’d need this.” He perches on the sofa beside me and dabs at the cut with alcohol wipes.

“Wait, how’d you all get up here?”

Aang rolls his eyes. “You think you’re so exclusive, do you?”

“No, I just … It’s not like I can walk into your rooms, can I?”

“That part was me.” Gage saunters in from the kitchen, a glass of ice water in his hand.

I make a show of looking around. “Is there anyone else in this clown car of an apartment?” A splinter of worry creeps through me at Gage being here. Is Valen going to skewer him? Then again, we aren’t alone. Maybe?—

“Stop moving.” Wyatt tsks and keeps wiping at my forehead.

“Everybody shut up so she can spill!” Evie harrumphs and takes the water from Gage.

I sit back and let them fuss over me as I recount what happened to their engaging ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ and ‘that prick’ when I tell them about the soldier who wanted to shoot me. “I still don’t know what the protest was about.”

“The blood resorts,” Gage says. He’s standing where he has a view of the hallway and the rest of the open areas of the apartment, his body tense. “A lot of people have hatched a conspiracy theory that it’s the government doing experiments on people to create an even deadlier version of the virus. There’s also a second, competing theory that they’re stealing healthy blood from the unsuspecting volunteers to replace the plague-ridden blood of billionaires and the Illuminati. Take your pick. Unrest has been spreading, but this is the first time since the outbreak started that we’ve had to muster for the Capitol.”

“By ‘muster’ do you mean ‘gas civilians’?” I ask curtly as Wyatt sticks a plaster over my cut.

Gage shakes his head. “I didn’t know about that. If I had any idea there was the slightest bit of risk, I never would’ve let you walk away. That protest—” He shakes his head. “I don’t think it was a coincidence.”

“Huh?” Wyatt finishes with my forehead.

“Nothing.” Gage’s expression goes from thoughtful to almost blank. “Nothing to worry about.”

I try to frown at him, but my face hurts too much to make a decent effort. That’s when I notice his eyes are red, too. “Did the gas get you?”

He shrugs and glances away. “When I heard the shots, I went after you.”

Oh, shit. He’d been looking for me. He didn’t find me, though.

Valen did. And just in time.

I don’t want to think about the soldier who hurt me, the things he said, the things he was prepared to do. I almost died today. Was it on Juno’s orders? Is she the one saying it’s okay to kill civilians? There’s no way she’d allow that. Then again, Gage seemed to think the protest was something more, something sinister almost. I don’t know who the bad guys are anymore, not when it comes to humans.

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