Page 47 of The Infinite Glade
“We can drink this.” Dominic held up a blue liquid from a fridge unit. Of course,the units in the corner.Alexandra made her way over and grabbed it out of Dominic’s hand.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
Orphans only had themselves.
Their thoughts. Their sanity.
Alexandra seemed to have lost both of hers.
A thud from the balcony stole Minho’s attention. “Orange?” He motioned for her to keep a watch.
“Just some ice falling,” she called back. “But the smoke from the city is spreading out here and it’s getting hard to see for a good watch. What’s the plan?”
Minho looked outside, up at the roof, and out to the waters where theMaze Cuttersat stranded. He could barely see the ship through the smoke and the trees. He much preferred the open sights for miles and miles like he’d had on the walls of the Remnant Nation fortress.
“I’ll go downstairs to watch for the night. You’ll stay here?” Minho asked Orange. They couldn’t stay at the Villa without water, but he had to wait until daylight to see just how bad the damage to theMaze Cutterwas or how to patch any possible holes in the ship. “Check in . . . in a couple hours?”
Orange nodded. “Safe watch.”
“Safe watch.” He mumbled the old soldier’s mantra. It was one of the only things changing guards said to each other—there were no greetings or small talk. Just two words that meant: hello, goodbye, and good luck. He headed downstairs by the light of the gun’s scope, his eyes heavy, his stomach cramped from hunger. But it was only a few hours until sunrise and then they’d figure out a plan.
A loud thump from above stopped Minho’s descent. He pivoted, ran back upstairs to the balcony, half expecting to see Orange cut in half by a large sheet of ice, his imagination getting the best of him. But she was whole, unharmed.
“Clear?” he asked, trying not to show his immense relief. “What was that noise? It shook the whole damn building. Are Remnant bombs still going off?”
Then he noticed that Orange looked about as broken as Skinny’s nose when he died.
“What?” Minho asked.
But Orange just stared at him as if he should already know what happened. He’d never known her to hold back words, regardless of what she thought he should or shouldn’t know. She unfroze herself enough to load up her gun with more bullets. “Orange! What’s going on, what was that?”
“Minho . . .” Orange’s voice shook, another rarity. “Prepare for combat. That was a grenade.”
He whipped his head around to look past the tree line from the balcony. Orange had a better eagle-eye view up here than he would have had downstairs. A fire burned in the distance.
“Oh, no.” He backed up into the room. “TheMaze Cutter?”
Orange nodded.
All of Minho’s senses came alive, his eyes no longer tired and his stomach no longer hungry—the only sensation that filled every cell in his body was to fight. It was his very instinct, almost his only instinct.
“Airdrop. Maybe they’re just doing flyovers.” He tried to reassure Orange, and himself, until five gunshots fired off from below, loud cracks that shattered the silence. And then, all at once, he knew it was over before it began. If there was one gunshot there were a dozen to come, but with five shots right at the start. . . . That meant there were fifty soldiers or more. He knew the Nation’s tactics all too well.
But as to their response, it changed nothing. “We can hold them off. Fire at the front line and I’ll get the back. We can do this.”
“Or die trying.” Somehow, Orange said the words with a grin. An actual grin. She positioned her gun on the railing of the balcony.
Minho ran downstairs, leaping two steps at a time, yelling at the others. “They’re here! It’s an attack! Get back from the windows!”
“Wait . . . who?” Dominic asked.
A simple question with a simple answer. In less than two minutes the Remnant Nation, an army of Orphans with nothing to lose and nothing to live for, with chained Cranks or half-Cranks, would attack full-force. Firing ammunition of mixed metals and shrapnel, killing all of them or worse—take them alive.
But Minho couldn’t tell Dom that. “Just get back, alright?”
“What do we do?” Dominic asked, “Just hide?”
Minho shook his head. “There’s no hiding from these people.” Regret pulsed through his blood.He should have turned the Maze Cutter around as soon as they saw signs of war.They should have turned tail before ever getting to the coast. He’d failed in controlling Alexandra. He’d failed, utterly. He loaded his gun with as many bullets as it could hold. “If they capture you, don’t say a word about anything.” Useless advice at that moment, but it was the best Minho had to give.
