streetlights shining on the other side. The way to it was clear, but we couldn’t leave. Not yet.
“Where would they keep a prisoner?” I asked, trying to shake James out of his shock. “James?”
He nodded down a hall across from the mess and I moved toward it, pulling him along, trying to ignore the pain that came with every step. The battle sounds grew louder, the deeper we ran into the base. I followed James’s direction, ducking into doorways at any sign of the soldiers who stalked the hallways, never knowing if they were Path or Fed. We passed bodies, fallen singly or in groups, torn, bloody, eyes open.
James pointed down a corridor where a young Path corporal was collapsed over a small desk, a pool of blood gathering around his temple. Behind him was a hallway lined with close-set rooms.
I set James down in the hallway, then searched the corporal for his keys. I found them and moved down the line of rooms, opening door after door, only to find the rooms empty or their occupants dead.
I stuck the key in the second door from the end and when I opened it, a body flew at me from a far corner. A fist connected with my jaw and I hit the floor in a heap, fireworks lighting up my vision.
“What are you doing here?”
Nat was leaning over me, one hand grasping my collar, the other ready to strike.
“We came to get you out,” I said, and when her glare didn’t soften, I shoved her away from me. “Trust me or don’t. You’re free. Do what you want. James, let’s go!”
I pushed us both into the hallway just as another volley of fire erupted. James flew out of my hands with a grunt, slamming into the wall and hitting the floor.
“James!”
He was sprawled on his back. His right side was gushing blood and he was breathing in ugly gasps. His skin was the color of paste. I pressed my hands into the wound to stop the bleeding and James screamed. I was dimly aware of Nat pulling Hill’s gun away from me. There was more gunfire and then silence. James’s eyes had gone wide and dark and then began to close.
I draped James’s arm over my shoulder. He cried out as I took a halting step forward. My knees went weak and I began to fall but then the weight suddenly lessened. Nat was beside us, James’s other arm around her shoulder.
The building was a maze, corridors blocked by bodies and collapsed walls. There were fires everywhere and clouds of smoke that burned our eyes and tore at our throats. We blundered through, coming to dead end after dead end. James hung between us, barely conscious, his lips moving soundlessly as he prayed.
“This way!”
Nat turned us down a hallway and I saw it. The door by the mess. We were almost there. Nat threw her shoulder into the door and we collapsed on the other side, coughing the smoke out of our lungs.
“James?”
His head lolled back and forth on the pavement. His eyes were closed and he was mumbling silently, incoherently. Buildings and wrecked vehicles burned all around us. Bodies littered the ground, and soldiers ran in and out of the darkness, firing constantly.
“Get somebody,” I said to Nat. “Get anybody. Please.”
Nat ran out of our small circle of light and disappeared down the street. There was a dead soldier facedown on the ground nearby. I took his combat knife and canteen and returned to James. His torso was slick with blood. His pants were dark with it. I stripped off his shirt and washed away as much as I could, revealing the ugly tear of a wound on his side. When I pressed the wad of bandages into his side, blood flowed between my fingers, but James didn’t make a sound. He pawed at my hands and I knocked them away.
“It’s okay,” he said weakly. “I’m okay.”
His eyes opened, shockingly bright. The sky lit up nearby and the pavement shuddered.
“Where are we?” he asked, in almost a singsongy kid’s voice. “It feels like we’re on a train.”
I smoothed the hair off his brow. His skin was hot and wet. “Yeah,” I said. “We’re on a train.”
“Where are we going? We going home?”
“That’s right,” I said. “We’re going home.”
I lifted the canteen to his lips and poured a stream of water across them. He gasped and drank. When he was done, I set the canteen down and took his hand in mine and squeezed. A strange smile rose on his face.
“Why is my brother holding my hand?” he said dreamily. “And when will he stop?”
I searched the dark of the base for Nat and saw nothing. A scream was rising in my throat, but I swallowed it.
“My friend is looking for help. She’ll be back any time now.”
“I killed him, Cal. I was looking for you, and then I heard the fight. I just saw someone on top of you. I didn’t know who it was. I didn’t—”
“You saved my life.”
James shook his head, and then his eyes narrowed like he was searching for something in the sky. Across the street three figures emerged from the dark and were coming our way fast. I gripped the combat knife and leaned over James, but when they moved into the light, I saw it was Nat followed by two soldiers. I waved them over frantically.
“James, we’re going to get you out of here, okay?”
When I looked down, his eyes were wide with horror, staring up into the dark. Tears ran across his cheeks.
“James?”
“… I didn’t know it was him.”
26
More than a month later, I stepped out into what used to be Camp Kestrel.
It was a bright day and hot, dusty from the dried mud kicked up by the Fed vehicles tearing through the streets. I gathered my things and left the barracks I had been staying in since Nat helped convince the Fed MPs that James and I weren’t a threat to national security.
I walked through the camp toward the infirmary, watching the Fed soldiers. Some went about the work of packing for the push south diligently, but most lounged on hillsides and across the hoods of vehicles. They smoked cigarettes and laughed. Their uniforms were ragged. The officers tried to keep order but few listened.
Path tents lay in molding piles of canvas all around the camp, but the command buildings still stood, gutted of intelligence and repurposed. Fed drone crews now sat in the place of their Path counterparts.
I paused by a blighted rectangle of ash and trampled grass. The Lighthouse had been the first thing the Feds destroyed, torching it to the cheers of their men. The altar was now a pile of scorched wood. The Path insignia had fallen and was facedown in the dirt, black and twisted. Soldiers still gathered to have their pictures taken with it, thumbs up and grinning. I knew I shouldn’t have cared, but for some reason, I was glad I hadn’t been there to see its destruction.
When I arrived at the infirmary, an orderly was pushing James’s wheelchair out into the sun. James looked as much like a ghost as Kestrel did. His skin was a waxy gray and all the weight he had lost gave him a skeletal look. His deep-set eyes seemed to stay permanently fixed to the ground. He’d barely spoken since we arrived.
“You ready?”
James said nothing. I passed the orderly a small wad of cash and he gave me a bag of medicine that I tucked into my backpack. After he left I reached for the back of the wheelchair, but James waved me away.
“James…”
“I can walk on my own.”
He planted his hands on the wheelchair’s armrests and pushed, his face white with strain. He wavered once but he closed his eyes for a moment and it passed. I led him around the infirmary and pulled open the door of a rust-and-blue hatchback. James dropped into the backseat and I shut the door.
“Nice of them to give you a new cast.”
Nat was standing on the other side of the car in a swirl of dust. I had only seen her a few times since we’d arrived at Kestrel. Each time was from a distance, as she tried to talk her way into companies of Marines heading
