Omega Brutes are not intelligent. Do not mistake this for a weakness. A creature that cannot think cannot be frightened, cannot be bargained with, and cannot be talked out of a fight. Aim for the cores. If you cannot reach the cores, withdraw and call for support.
—Guardian Council Field Manual, Section Six: Omega Brutes
Seven days in the field is all it takes to go from wanting to be a hero to wanting to be horizontal, and today, I've chosen horizontal.
The roof of the old pharmacy is warm from what little sun gets through the clouds, and I'm stretched out on it with my hands behind my head like it's a beach, which it isn't. The sign over the door below still says OPEN in letters nobody has bothered to turn off in thirty years, and the whole building smells faintly of mould and cough syrup. But it's quiet and it's flat, and nothing has tried to eat me here yet, which puts it in the top three places I've slept all week.
The sky is the colour of old dishwater, the way it always is. Somewhere under me a burst pipe drips into a puddle, slow and steady, and for the first time in seven days nobody is screaming, so I close my eyes.
Seven days, eleven Abominations, and maybe two hours of real sleep if I add up all the naps and I'm generous about it. I've learned more out here than I did in three years of camp: rations taste worse wet, Chameleon Chasers smell like vinegar right before they jump you, and there is no rooftop in this city high enough to hide from Aurora Grey.
"Peace and quiet," I tell the sky. "Finally."
My watch buzzes, and I don't open my eyes. "No."
It buzzes again, then a third time, longer, in the specific rhythm that means priority, and I know before I even look that the universe heard me and thought it was hilarious.
[GUARDIAN FIELD ALERT — PRIORITY 2]
[Hostiles confirmed: Omega Brute ×3]
[Location: Old Market District, Grid 14-C]
[Civilians in zone: 23 (estimated)]
[Assigned unit: Squad Solomon]
Twenty-three estimated, which always means more. Aurora's name pops up under the alert and the call connects before I can pretend I didn't see it, and four faces squash onto a screen the size of a biscuit. Aurora is on top with her jaw tight, and Ezra is already running, the background behind him just a blur of brick. Dante is grinning like someone promised him cake, and Ryder is looking at the camera the way he looks at everything, like he's still deciding whether it's worth the effort.
"Old market," Aurora says. "Three brutes. I'm on the roof of the textile building, I can see all of it. There's people everywhere. I've marked it on your maps."
Her voice is calm, and that's what worries me, because Aurora only gets that calm when she's holding something down with both hands.
"Coming," Ezra says. He doesn't ask anything else, because he never does. I'm pretty sure Ezra was born already running toward something.
"Us too," says Dante. "Ryder's with me. He's thrilled. Ryder, tell them how thrilled you are."
"I'm fine," Ryder says.
"He sighed. Twice. I counted."
"I sighed once."
"Twice, bro."
I tilt my watch up so they can all see the sky. "Okay, but hear me out. Do we have to go right now? Like, could the brutes wait twenty minutes? I was having a moment."
Aurora's eyes go narrow on the screen. "Marcus Chambers," she says, very slowly, "if you are not on your feet in the next three seconds, the next time I'm in range of you, I swear I'll put the sound of nails on a chalkboard in your head and leave it there all night."
"You can't even reach me from there."
"Which is why I said next time."
I'm already standing. Her range is about a street and a half, and our bunks are four metres apart, and I do not like those odds.
"Psycho," I mutter.
"I heard that."
"You were meant to."
She hangs up on me, but the squad channel stays open the way it always does on a live call-out, so I can still hear her breathing, quick and shallow. I look out at the city sprawling north, all broken roofs and dead billboards and washing lines strung between windows by people who refuse to stop living here, even now. There are twenty-three people down there, so I start running.
The thing about running across rooftops is that it looks cool in the training videos and feels terrible in real life. My legs are already complaining by the second jump, and I tell them to shut up and do it anyway.
Through the watch, I can hear Aurora talking under her breath, not to us but to herself.
"Okay. Okay. Come on, you can do this. Just get them moving. Just get them moving and nobody has to…" She stops. Breathes. "Okay."
I run faster, and by the time I hit the edge of the market district, I'm close enough to catch the end of what she's doing. It hits me out of nowhere, a voice that isn't a voice, landing right behind my eyes like a thought I didn't have. It isn't meant for me. She's pushing it out as wide as she can, and I've just run into the edge of it.
Everyone, listen to me. Don't look around for me, just listen. Move east, toward the blue building with the clock tower. Stay low and stay quiet. They hunt by sound. You're going to be okay.
Even from the edge, it's steady. I don't know how she does it. She's thirteen, same as me, and she sounds like somebody's mum.
Two rooftops out, I can finally see the market, and it's worse than the alert made it sound, the way alerts always are. The three brutes are bigger than the camp's main gate, grey-skinned and swollen with muscle in places muscle shouldn't be, like somebody built them out of three different animals and lost the instructions halfway through. One of them has a whole market stall in its fist, and as I watch, it throws it. The stall explodes against a shopfront in a spray of glass and wood, and somewhere underneath all the noise a baby is crying and crying and won't stop.
But the crowd is moving east, slowly and quietly, doing exactly what the voice in their heads told them to do. It's working, and then it isn't.
A woman at the back of the line, with a little boy on her hip, catches her foot on a length of metal pipe lying in the road. The CLANG goes across the market like a gunshot in a church. As she falls, she twists so the boy lands on top of her instead of on the concrete, which is the bravest and stupidest thing I've seen all week, and he starts screaming the second he hits her chest.
The nearest brute stops and turns. Its eyes are small and yellow and sunk deep into its skull, and when they settle on the woman and her son, my stomach drops all the way into my boots.
I'm too far, and I know it the second I see it. Two rooftops, one street and a three-storey drop stand between me and them, and I'm not going to make it. Ezra's closer, Ezra's always closer, but even he isn't close enough.
Across the square, I can see Aurora now, a small shape at the edge of the textile building's roof, and she goes completely still.
"Don't," I say into my watch. "Aurora, don't, you'll…"
But she's already doing it. I hear her suck in a breath through the speaker, then nothing, and down in the market the brute stops halfway through a step and jerks its head around like something just bit it.
It roars at nothing, swings at the empty air and spins in a circle, looking for whatever she's put in its head. For one second, then two, it's completely lost. Then it shakes itself like a dog coming out of a river and turns back to the woman.
Over the watch I hear Aurora gasp like she's just been punched, and on the roof, the small shape drops to one knee.
"No," she whispers. "No, no, no, no, come on…"
The brute raises its fist, and the sky splits open in blue.
I've seen Ezra hit things before. I've watched him put his fist through a wall at camp just to prove he could, and I once saw him knock the head clean off a Necroshambler and then apologise to it out of habit. None of that gets me ready for this.
He comes down off the rooftop like a falling star, wrapped in crackling blue light, with every bit of speed from his sprint and his jump and three storeys of falling packed into one closed hand. That's his whole thing: kinetic energy. He doesn't make power, he catches it from everything moving around him, saves it up and gives it all back at once, and right now he gives it all back into the side of the brute's skull.
The BOOM arrives half a second after the light. The brute's head snaps sideways and the rest of it follows, lifting clean off its feet, and when it hits the road the asphalt splits in a crack that runs half the length of the street. Dust rolls out in a wave, and every window left on the block shatters at once.
Ezra lands in a crouch beside the woman, breathing hard, with little blue sparks still crawling over his knuckles.
"You okay? Ma, can you stand?"
"My ankle," she gasps. "I think it's…"
"Don't worry about it. I've got you."
He scoops them both up, mother and son, like they weigh nothing, which to him I guess they don't. The little boy stops screaming and just stares up at Ezra with huge wet eyes, both fists twisted tight in Ezra's collar.
From two rooftops away, still running, I watch something happen on Ezra's face that I don't have a word for. For a second he isn't in the market at all, but somewhere a long way back. His mouth goes soft and his eyes go somewhere far away, and his arms tighten around that kid like somebody once held him exactly the same way.
I don't know much about Ezra's life before camp, because he doesn't talk about it. I think maybe I just found out why.
"Thank you," the woman whispers. "Oh my God, thank you, you saved our…"
"Don't thank me yet," Ezra says, and comes back to himself. "Let's get you out of…"
Behind him, the brute is getting up. Half its face is caved in and one eye is dangling out of the socket. Anything normal would be dead. Anything normal would at least have the decency to stay down, but Abominations stopped being normal a long time ago. It plants its fists into the broken road and pushes itself up, and up, until it's standing at full height right behind Ezra's back with both arms lifted over its head. Ezra's arms are full and at that position he can't block or dodge, not without dropping them.
"EZRA, BEHIND YOU!"
Aurora's scream comes through my watch and across the whole square at the same time, so loud the speaker crackles. Down in the street, Ezra's head snaps around, and I watch him see it and understand it. Then, without even a second of hesitation, he turns his back on the brute and curls himself around the woman and the boy like a shell. He's going to take the hit, the absolute idiot.
I hit the edge of the last roof and don't stop, because there's no time to land and no time for anything else. I jump, and somewhere in the air I bring both hands up together, fingers out and thumbs cocked, the way every kid in the world does when they're playing guns.
The dark matter comes before I even finish asking for it. It always feels the same, cold and heavy, like holding a stone that's been sitting at the bottom of a river. It pours down my arms and out through my fingers, and the world goes purple as two beams tear loose, one for the head and one for the chest right where the cores sit, with a sound like ripping fabric.
The first one goes straight through its skull. The second punches a hole the size of a dinner plate through the middle of its chest, and I feel it hit something hard and crack it. For a moment the brute just stands there with its fists still up and a look on what's left of its face that's almost confused, and then it tips over backward and crashes into the road, and this time it stays down.
I land badly, roll, and come up on one knee in the dust with my hands still out and purple smoke curling off my fingertips, and I blow on them, because I have wanted to do that since I was six years old.
"Bang," I say.
Ezra lets out a breath like he's been holding it since camp. "You really took your sweet time."
"You're welcome. Seriously. Don't mention it." I tap my watch. "No, actually, I mean that. Don't mention it. To her."
"YOU WERE LATE!" Aurora yells through the speaker. Her voice cracks right in the middle of it, and I pretend I didn't hear that part.
Ezra sets the woman down behind a half-fallen wall and points east. "Blue building. The one with the clock. Go, and don't stop for anything, okay?"
She nods, with tears cutting clean lines through the dust on her face, and limps away with her son clinging to her neck. The boy watches Ezra over her shoulder the whole time and doesn't look away until they've turned the corner, and Ezra watches him back just as long.
"Okay," Aurora says, quieter now. I can hear her wiping her face. "Okay. One down. Ryder? Dante? Where are you guys?"
There's a crash on the line. "Busy," says Ryder, out of breath.
Then Dante, laughing like a maniac. "It's under control!"
Another crash. "Mostly!"
I don't see the second fight, I only hear it through the watch, which is almost worse. The brute is roaring, and water is splashing deep and heavy like they're fighting in a flood, and Dante is yelling Ryder's name. There's a wet crunch I really don't want to think about, then a long, low, shuddering groan, a huge splash, and silence.
Then Dante, soaked and outraged: "Okay. Okay, I deserved that."
A second later, cheerfully: "All done here. Brute number two is having a lovely little nap. Ryder did the cool part. I did the part where I got wet."
We get the full story at dinner, because of course we do, and Dante tells it with his whole body. He turned his arms into a silverback's and took the brute out at the knee, and then Ryder stepped right into its swing and let the fist pass through him like he was made of smoke. Dante cupped his huge gorilla hands and launched Ryder into the air, and Ryder came down with his arm gone see-through and pushed it straight into the brute's skull and felt around in there, Dante says, "like he was looking for his keys," until he found the cores and made his hand solid again and squeezed.
When we all meet up twenty minutes later, Ryder's standing a little way off from the rest of us, scrubbing his hand on his trousers like it personally offended him.
"Gross," he says.
"Yeah," Dante says, grinning and dripping. "You should've felt the water."
"Great job, guys," Aurora says, and you can hear that she means it. "Seriously. But that's two. There's still one more out there somewhere, so let's split up and find it before it finds anybody else."
So we split up. Ezra takes the rooftops and Dante and Ryder sweep the alleys north, while Aurora stays up high, looking around with her eyes and with whatever else she uses. I take the main road, because it's flat, and because my legs have reached the point in the week where flat feels like a love language.
It's quiet. Too quiet, I think, and then I immediately hate myself for thinking it, because that's a line from a film, and in films things always go wrong right after somebody says it.
Then the screech comes. It starts somewhere south, like sheet metal being torn apart by something with a throat, and it keeps going long after anything with lungs should have run out of air, so loud I feel it in my back teeth.
When it finally stops, there's half a second of silence before something answers it. Then another one answers, and then three more at the same time, from every direction, perfectly in time with each other, until there are six.
A pigeon explodes off a ledge somewhere above me, and nobody on the line says anything.
"Did…" My voice comes out weird. I try again. "Did you guys hear that?"
"Yeah," Aurora says quietly.
"We heard it," says Dante.
Ryder's last. "That doesn't sound good."
"That's not a brute," Aurora says slowly. "Brutes don't sound like that. And they don't do it all together. Why would they all scream at the exact same…"
"Uh. Guys?"
It's Ezra, and his voice is low and very calm. By now all of us know that Ezra's calm and Aurora's calm are the same kind of calm, the kind that means you should be scared.
"I don't think it's just one brute anymore."
He sends us the feed from his watch, and I stop running to look at it: a car park, or what's left of one, and six things tearing it to pieces.
They're lower to the ground than the brutes, long and plated, with armour overlapping down their backs like crocodile scales and legs that bend in too many places. But it's the mouths that make my stomach turn over, because their jaws open way too far, splitting their whole heads almost in half to show row after row of teeth like a smashed window. While I'm watching, one of them bites down on the roof of a car and the metal folds around its teeth like wet paper.
[THREAT UPDATE]
[New hostiles detected: Maw Demon ×6]
[Recommended response: Veteran squad or higher]
[Nearest veteran squad: 41 minutes]
Forty-one minutes is a long time. "There's six Mawers down here," Ezra says, "and they're wrecking everything. Cars, walls, all of it. If they head north they're going to hit the clock tower."
That's where everybody's hiding, including the woman with the bad ankle and the little boy who wouldn't stop staring. Nobody says it, because nobody has to.
"Oh, come ON," I say, because somebody has to say something, and it might as well be the guy who's already run across half the city today. "One week! I've been out here one week, I haven't slept three hours in a row, and now there's six of them? Six?"
"Stop complaining, Marcus," Aurora says. "We're all going through the same thing."
"Yeah, but I'm processing it out loud, which is actually really healthy if you think about…"
"Marcus."
It isn't angry. It's something else, and under it I can hear that her voice isn't totally steady.
"…shutting up," I say.
Ezra goes quiet on the line for a long moment, and I can almost hear him thinking. You'd never guess it to look at him, but Ezra thinks the way some people pray, slowly and carefully, like it matters which words go first.
The field manual says you don't take on Maw demons with less than a full squad of veterans. I remember that line because the instructor made us copy it out twenty times, along with everything else about them: hides that stop bullets, jaws strong enough to bend steel, and cores buried deep in the chest under the thickest plates. We're five kids with one week of experience, our master isn't picking up her watch, and help is forty-one minutes away.
"Okay," Ezra says. "While you guys are getting here, here's what we do."
And then he just lays it out, fast and clean, like he's been planning it his whole life. "Aurora, you're distraction. Get in their heads once you're close, keep them looking the wrong way, whatever it takes. Dante, there's scrap everywhere down here. Cars, pipes, signs, everything. Make us something sharp. Spears, stakes, anything with a point on it. Marcus, you take whatever Dante makes, fill it with dark matter and throw it. Normal hits won't get through that armour, but if your stuff went through a brute's head, it'll crack theirs. Ryder, soon as the armour's cracked, you go in and crush the cores, same as the brute. I'll keep them busy and break whatever I can."
There's silence on the line, and then Dante, very quietly, actually impressed: "Look at you. Leader Ezra."
"Shut up."
"No, I'm being serious! That was good!"
"It's a good plan," Aurora says. "Come on. Everybody move."
We meet on the roof above the car park, all five of us, and up close it's worse. The smell hits first, rot and engine oil and something sour underneath, like milk left out in the sun. The Mawers move like hunting dogs, low and fast and loose, their plated backs scraping along the cars as they pass, and one of them is just chewing on a lamppost like it's a toy.
I lean over the edge and look at them for a long time, then I look at Ezra.
"This is your plan," I say. "I want that on record. If we all die, it was your plan."
"Noted."
Ryder doesn't say anything. He's watching the demons really carefully, his eyes going from one to the next like he's counting, because Ryder's always counting something.
Aurora sits down cross-legged on the gravel and closes her eyes. There's still dried blood on her lip from earlier, and nobody says anything about it.
"Okay," she says. "I'm in range. Going in."
Down in the car park, six heads lift at once and turn west, snapping their jaws at nothing, like something just stepped out of the shadows over there. One of them charges a blank concrete wall and smashes into it face first, while two others start snarling and circling each other with their tails lashing.
"They think there's a pack of hounds," Aurora says through her teeth. "Big ones. I can't hold it forever, so whatever you're doing, do it fast."
"Say less." Dante steps right off the roof.
He drops the whole way like it's nothing and lands in a crouch next to a pile of wrecked cars, and as he straightens up, his hands are already changing, the fingers stretching and hardening and the nails going thick and dark and curling into hooks. He grabs the bumper of the nearest car, peels it off like he's peeling an orange, rips it down the middle and twists both halves into points. Then he does the same to a metal pipe, and another one, and a street sign, with sparks flying off his claws, until in under a minute there's a pile of ugly, jagged spears at his feet.
"Marcus! Catch!"
He throws them up one at a time, and I catch the first one, wrap both hands around it and push. Purple bleeds out of my palms and crawls along the metal like veins, and the spear goes dark and starts to hum, low and pleased, the way dark matter always does when it has something to do. The air around it bends a little, like the air over a road in summer.
I throw, and it hits the biggest Mawer high in the shoulder and keeps going, the dark matter eating through the armour like wet cardboard. The demon shrieks with a noise like a train slamming on its brakes and spins all the way around.
The illusion breaks, and it sees us.
"Uh oh," I say.
All six of them turn. "Aurora!" Ezra shouts.
"I'm TRYING!" She's gone pale. Sweat is running down her face and there's fresh blood coming from her nose. "There's too many of them now, I can't hold all six at once…"
Ezra jumps. He goes off the roof with the blue already crackling around him and doesn't try to slow down at all, falling three storeys and catching every bit of it, and when he hits the ground he doesn't land so much as let go. The shockwave throws the two closest Mawers into a concrete pillar so hard it cracks.
He's moving before they even hit it, left fist into the jaw of the third one and right fist into its ribs, and every punch rings like a bell and cracks another plate.
A fourth comes at him from the side with its jaws open wide enough to swallow him down to the waist. He throws himself backward and the teeth slam shut about an inch from his nose, and he kicks it in the throat and rolls clear.
"SPEAR!"
I'm already throwing. It whistles right past his ear and buries itself in that open mouth, and the demon chokes and staggers.
"Ryder, it's cracked! NOW!"
Ryder doesn't bother climbing down. He just steps off the roof and falls straight through the building, phasing through the top floor and the next one like they aren't there, and comes out at street level already running. He goes right through a parked van without slowing down and slides under the staggering demon, and his hand goes up and in, through armour and bone, into its chest. His face goes very still as he squeezes. The demon stiffens, shudders and drops right on the spot where Ryder was lying a second ago, and Ryder phases up out of its back, coughing and wiping his hand on his leg again.
"One," he says.
After that, it's all kind of a blur, and I only remember pieces. Dante is tearing the car park apart, making spears faster than I can throw them, his arms flicking from human to gorilla to claws and back again. Aurora is holding them in short, ugly bursts, making one think it's on fire and another think the ground has disappeared, buying us a second here and two seconds there with blood dripping off her chin. Ezra is hitting them, and hitting them, and hitting them, until his knuckles are split open and the blue around his fists is flickering like a dying bulb. And I'm throwing until my arms ache and my shoulders burn.
The second one goes down, and right after, a tail catches Dante across the chest and throws him into a wall. He gets up laughing, which honestly scares me more than if he'd stayed down.
The third one goes down, and then I miss, and the spear sails right over a demon's head and sticks in a lamppost, wobbling.
"That was on purpose," I pant, to nobody. "Psychological warfare."
The fourth one goes down, and then one of them gets past us. I don't even see how. One second it's in the middle of the lot, and the next it's at the bottom of our building with its claws digging into the brick, climbing fast, straight up toward Aurora.
She opens her eyes and sees it coming. She tries to get up, but her legs won't do it, and I can see she's got nothing left, grey all over with her hands shaking in her lap.
"AURORA!" Ezra screams.
He's too far, Ryder's stuck under the fourth body, and I'm out of spears.
Dante gets there first, and I don't think he even decides to. His legs change mid-step, stretching out long and powerful and wrong, and he takes the side of the building in two massive jumps and lands on the roof between Aurora and the open jaws with his arms spread wide.
The jaws close on his forearm, and Dante screams. It's nothing like his jokes. It's raw and young and real, the sound of a thirteen-year-old kid in more pain than he's ever been in, and Aurora flinches like she's the one who got hit. For a second I can't breathe.
But he doesn't let go. His arm is already changing inside the demon's mouth, the bone thickening and the skin going hard and grey and stony, until the thing is biting down on something it can't crush. Its teeth grind, and Dante's face goes white as he shakes all over.
"Marcus," he gets out through his teeth. "Anytime now, man."
Then I see it: the spear I missed with, still stuck in the lamppost and still wobbling, about ten feet from where I'm standing. I yank it out and give it everything, every last drop I have. The purple floods out of me so fast it makes my ears ring, and the spear goes from purple to something past purple, something so dark it looks like a hole cut in the world, singing with a high, thin whine I can feel in my teeth.
I throw it, and it goes in one side of the demon's head and out the other, and the jaws go slack.
Dante drags his arm free. The Mawer slides down the wall, leaving long scratches in the brick, and hits the ground with a wet, heavy thud, and that's five.
The last one stands by itself in the middle of the car park with its whole pack lying around it. For a second it doesn't move, and Ezra swears afterward that it looked scared. Then Ryder rises up out of the ground right underneath it, hand first, and it never gets the chance to run. That makes six.
The car park goes quiet. Ezra's standing in the middle of it, chest heaving and knuckles torn open, with the last of the blue fizzling out around his fists, and Ryder's on his hands and knees next to the last body, breathing hard. I'm sitting against the wheel of a wrecked car, because at some point my legs decided they were done, and I'm honestly not sure I'm ever getting up again.
Up on the roof, Aurora has Dante's arm in her lap and is staring at the teeth marks.
"Is it bad?" she asks. Her voice is really small.
Dante flexes his fingers and winces. The grey is fading, and as his arm shifts back to normal the holes pull closed, mostly but not all the way. There's going to be a scar.
"I'll live," he says. "Would've been way worse if I was slower, though."
"Why would you do that?" Her voice cracks right down the middle. "You could've lost your arm. You barely even know me."
Dante looks at her like she's just asked him something really silly. "We're a team now," he says. "Aren't we?"
Aurora doesn't answer. She just nods, really fast, and turns her face away and wipes it on her sleeve.
I look at Dante, smiling at her with blood all down his arm, and I think, okay, maybe this squad isn't so bad. Then, because I honestly don't know what else to do, I start laughing.
It starts as a snort and turns into something I can't stop, the stupid, helpless kind that makes your ribs hurt. "We did it," I wheeze. "We actually did it. Six Mawers! Six! Ezra, your stupid plan worked! And that miss was totally on purpose!"
Ezra stares at me, then smiles, then cracks up too. Ryder goes next, quietly, into his sleeve, then Dante up on the roof, and finally Aurora, until all five of us are laughing like idiots in a car park full of dead monsters, because we're thirteen and we're alive and nobody ever told us what you're supposed to do with a feeling that big.
That's when every single watch buzzes at once, and Andrea's face fills the screen. She is not laughing.
"Aren't you lot," she says slowly, "supposed to be subduing Abominations?"
Aurora sits bolt upright. "Andrea! Hi! Yes. Yeah. We literally just finished."
"Did you." It isn't a question. "Then why am I looking at a report of an Omega Brute tearing apart a water station in the area YOU WERE SENT TO?"
There's silence, and five faces turn toward each other in slow motion as it sinks in. The third brute. We completely forgot about the third brute.
"We were getting to that," Ezra says carefully. "We just got a bit sidetracked. By some Maw demons."
"Six of them," I add, and hold up six fingers to the watch, like that's going to help.
Andrea goes still and looks at each of us in turn, at the blood and the dust, at Ezra's knuckles and Dante's arm. Something crosses her face, quick, like a cloud passing over the sun, and if I didn't know better, I'd say she was proud. Then it's gone, and she sighs.
"Just hurry up with that brute. The higher-ups aren't happy." She pauses. "Summers, get that arm looked at the second you're back."
The call ends. Aurora looks at the black screen. "Guess we aren't done yet." All five of us groan at the same time.
The third brute is standing knee-deep in a flooded water station, ripping pipes out of the wall and chewing on them. It's smaller than the other two, and it is also, we all agree later, the stupidest Abomination any of us has ever seen. Ezra punches it in the knee and it falls over.
I lie down on my stomach on the wall above it, because standing up is no longer something I do, rest my chin on the bricks and make a gun with one hand. One lazy beam, and it's perfect.
"Done," I say, and close my eyes. "Wake me up when we're home."
It's dark by the time we limp back through the gates in a slow, sorry line, with dust in our hair, blood on our clothes, and something from the Mawers on our boots that none of us want to think about. Dante's arm is wrapped in a bandage Aurora made out of her own sleeve, and Ryder is basically asleep on his feet.
"Man," I say, to nobody and everybody, "I'm beat."
"You slept on a wall for the entire last fight," says Ezra.
"Best nap of my life. Still beat."
Andrea is waiting for us at the gate, leaning on her good leg with the prosthetic catching the floodlight and a cigarette burning down between two fingers. She doesn't say anything when we walk up. She just looks at us one at a time, the same way she did on the call, like she's counting, like she's making sure we all came back. Then she reaches out and puts her hand on Ezra's shoulder, quickly, just for a second.
"Six Maw demons," she says quietly. "At thirteen. One week in." She shakes her head. "Go eat. Go sleep. You earned it."
I'm so surprised I forget to say anything clever. She limps away, and I swear she's almost smiling.
The others have saved me a seat at dinner. Dante has his good arm around Aurora's shoulders, telling the gorilla story for the third time, and it gets bigger every time he tells it. Ezra laughs in all the right places, and even Ryder smiles a little into his food. I sit down and laugh with them, because it's easy, and because I want to.
Later, lying in my bunk, I think about those screeches for a minute, all six of them going off at once, perfectly in time. It's weird, because Maw demons don't usually do that. It's probably nothing. Probably.
Then Dante starts snoring like a chainsaw in the bunk below, and I decide it's a problem for tomorrow