He was camouflaging me.
And then he stood in front of me, using his body to barricade mine.
We waited like that, listening for more screams or shouts. For gunfire or another round of explosives. But instead we heard only the sound of approaching feet. Inside the fabric that swathed my face, it grew harder and harder to breathe, but I didn’t complain. I didn’t even shuffle my feet. I simply kept my eyes wide and alert, straining to see.
“Commander Maier?” A woman’s voice finally cut through the dense smoke, using Brooklynn’s formal title. “Are you in here?”
Brook released the children’s hands. “I’m here. We’re all here.”
Behind the woman—one of the guards who’d been in front of the school that morning—there were several more soldiers, all wearing the same uniform. All standing at attention, awaiting word from their leader . . . from Brook.
“The army arrived shortly after the first bomb was detonated,” the soldier stated as she stepped forward, her stance formal and stiff. I released a breath and hugged the boy, relief swelling through me as I unraveled Zafir’s shirt from my face as I listened. “We lost a lot of civilians in the blasts, even more in the gun battle.”
The use of the word “civilians” made my stomach tighten. Children, I thought. She meant children.
“Once the terrorists realized they were outnumbered, they fled. The ones our forces didn’t get, the snipers took care of on their way out of the buildings. Unfortunately, we didn’t take a single one of them alive, so we have no way of knowing who, exactly, was responsible for the attack here today.”
Brooklynn sighed, and there was nothing rigid about her posture. She looked deflated, defeated. “Yes we do,” she said simply, running her hand through her tangled curls. “It was my father.”
When we exited the building, the sunlight nearly blinded me and I had to shield my eyes until they’d adjusted.
I heard a woman screaming, but not in the same way the students inside the walls of the Academy had screamed. Her voice, the woman’s, was filled with so much relief it nearly undid her. The little boy in my arms wiggled and struggled against me, and I had no choice but to release him the moment his feet hit the ground.
I glanced up in time to see the woman break free from the crowd, still shouting, and I realized she was calling out a name: “Phoenix!” she cried as the boy raced down the steps and jumped into her outstretched arms. She swallowed him up, hugging him ferociously. “Phoenix . . . Phoenix . . . my sweet baby Phoenix . . .” Her last words trailed into Parshon, and I wondered if it were simply habit, if she’d even realized she’d done it at all.
It had been easier inside, where the confusion and ugliness of the attacks had been concealed behind a thick veil of smoke. Out here, the destruction was all too clear, far too apparent. We could all see just how much damage had been done. How many lives had been lost.
I gazed down at my feet as I walked, trying not to look at the bodies that littered the wreckage, trying not to remember how I’d once envied those who walked upon these gleaming, polished steps.
It was the halo of golden hair I saw from the corner of my eye that caught my attention, making my steps falter. I froze midstep. My breath caught in my throat as I blinked hard, telling myself it wasn’t her. . . . It couldn’t be her.
But as I moved closer, something in my gut told me I was wrong.
I stopped in front of the girl lying facedown on the stairs, her limbs at odd, unnatural angles. There was a single bloodstain square between her shoulder blades. She’d been shot while she was trying to escape.
With trembling fingers, I brushed aside her hair, needing to see the truth for myself, needing to be certain.
Beneath the golden curtain, her face, turned to the side, was ashen, and her wide eyes were vacant.
My heart ached as I lifted her hand, clutching her cold fingers. . . . Fingers I’d held not so long ago during a riot in the park, a day that I’d decided to save her life, when we’d gone from being rivals to friends.
And suddenly I wished I’d listened to Brook when she’d warned me about her father. When she’d warned me he’d made threats against me.
Except she got it wrong.
I wasn’t the one in danger by being here today. I wasn’t the one who’d been injured.
It was everyone else.
Somewhere below me I heard a strange clicking sound, and I set Sydney’s hand down reverently, once more brushing my fingertips over her cheek. A final farewell.
Zafir reached for my arm. “We have to go,” he insisted, ushering me down the steps.
I heard another click, this time closer, and I glanced up to see a man, just a few steps below me, holding a camera. It wasn’t something most people owned, the camera. It had been a luxury item even before the days of Sabara’s rule, and seeing it here, in the streets, seemed odd and out of place.
I thought Zafir might take it from the man since he was pointing its lens right at me, snapping photo after photo. Instead, the guard moved to stand in front of me, signaling to one of the soldiers near the top of the steps who rushed down and escorted the man away from us. I didn’t know if they’d let the man keep his images, or his photography equipment. It wasn’t my concern at the moment.
When we reached the bottom of the steps, the woman who’d been screaming the boy’s name—Phoenix—stopped us.
“Thank you, Your Majesty,” she said weepily, still forgetting to speak in Englaise as she clutched her small boy to her heart. “Thank you for saving my son.”