“They tried to kill us,” he said, panting.
“Are you okay?”
“We have to get out of sight—away from the snipers.”
She tried to look at him as they ran, but her eyes were too blurry to see his wound. He seemed to be bleeding above his right ear, but he was moving too much to be sure.
“Why?” she shouted.
“I don’t know.”
They ran in between two buildings, out of the view of snipers—or at least, she hoped so. It should have been out of the soldiers’ view if they didn’t move. Jack began to stumble, and pulled her behind a Dumpster with him.
“What’s going on?” she asked, her hands on his head, trying to stave off the bleeding. His blood leaked through her fingers and down her arm, dripping from her elbow onto the pavement.
“I don’t know,” he panted. “Everything was fine. It was quiet. We were watching, and Rowley was getting routine checks from the snipers. And then all of a sudden he was pulling the detonator from his pocket, priming it.” Jack paused and wiped blood from his eye.
Aubrey couldn’t get the bleeding to stop. She pulled her sweater up over her head, ignoring the cold, wet Seattle weather in her flimsy military T-shirt. She mashed the sweater against his wound.
“The detonator?” she asked, panicked. “You mean, like, the ankle detonator?”
He nodded, and then winced at the movement. “It was all of a sudden. He didn’t say anything—he just heard something on his radio and pulled it out of his pocket. I swear, he was about to push the button.”
“How did you stop him?”
“Laura did,” Jack said, leaning his back against the filthy Dumpster. “She hit him and took it—she’s so fast —and I think she broke his arm. That’s when the fighting started.”
Aubrey peeked around the edge of the Dumpster toward the way they’d come, and then glanced up at the rooftops. She couldn’t see anyone. But she needed Jack’s eyes. She wouldn’t have been able to see a sniper on a rooftop even if her head wasn’t filled with adrenaline.
“What happened to you?” she asked, turning her attention back to him.
“McKinney tried to shoot me,” he said. “Right as Laura tackled him. I swear, she saved my life. Twice.”
“Where is she?”
She could feel him try to shake his head, but her hands wouldn’t let him. “I don’t know. The captain gave the order to the snipers to take out the Lambdas.”
“What? Why would he do that?” She felt herself starting to cry, and she pushed the feelings down. “Did you know why? You could hear the radio in his ear, couldn’t you?”
Jack smiled weakly. “I blocked it out because I was listening to you.”
“Oh great,” she said, forcing a laugh. “Good job, Aubrey. We have to get out of here.”
“Uncover my ear,” Jack said. “We’ve got to find Laura.”
FORTY-SIX
JACK TRIED TO PUSH EVERYTHING else out of his mind—the throbbing in his own head, his labored breathing, Aubrey’s poorly hidden sobs. He closed his eyes.
The pain was unbearable, and he kept trying to turn off the sense of touch—turn off the nerves in his own head. But it was an almost overwhelming task. He felt every shred of torn skin, every scrape against his skull, every broken blood vessel. It was excruciating.
There weren’t any voices, not from the music museum. He could hear one person’s breathing. He didn’t know if it was a soldier or Laura.
It had to be a soldier. None of the Green Berets would have left Laura alive, not after she attacked them so viciously.
But if she was dead, they’d have the detonator. Both he and Aubrey would have lost a leg by now.
He heard the sound of someone on a roof, but he couldn’t pick it out. It was near them—rubber soles on a steel roof. That had to be a sniper, unless Laura was climbing onto roofs now.
He tried to concentrate even more, but it was nearly useless. Every time he moved his head, trying to locate a sound, the rough rubbing of the bloody sweater distracted him.
Jack could hardly believe he was still alive. The bullet had come so close. He’d felt every bit of it, as if time had slowed down. He’d felt it rip through his skin, then skid around his skull. He wondered how much farther it would’ve needed to be to the left to have killed him instead of grazing him—a millimeter? Two? He could have been dead right there. No one would have alerted Aubrey, and she’d have been killed by a sniper.
There was a clatter on a rooftop, the sound of—of a gun? And then quiet. Breathing. Two people had just fought and one of them had beaten the other, and he had no idea who had won.
“We have to get up,” Jack said, looking in Aubrey’s eyes. He moved the sweater from his head—it was now just a soaked rag, and it was stopping him from finding help.
“Why?” she asked, plainly terrified.
“To find Laura. Now.”
Aubrey stared back at him for a moment, and then nodded. She stood, still hunched so she wouldn’t be seen over the Dumpster. She gave him her hand, and he pulled himself to his feet. He felt dizzy and tired, and he wondered if this was the right choice.
The breathing on the rooftop moved, quickly now, faster than a Green Beret could move. It had to be her.
Why was she fighting the snipers? Why weren’t they just getting out of there? Was it rage? Revenge? Did she think they were going to track them all down?
“You stay here,” Aubrey said. She reached into her small bag and pulled out the light pink bottle of Flowerbomb. It was a ridiculous image—she was wearing jeans and T-shirt, both her hands were smeared in his blood, and yet she was spraying herself with perfume.
His nose was immediately filled with the aroma of roses and orchids, mixed with the pungent iron scent of blood.
She smiled at him. “You look terrible.”
“You look like you just murdered me,” he answered.
She kissed him quickly, and then vanished.
She shouldn’t have done that. The smell was on him now, right under his nose. He scrubbed at his face with sticky, red fingers to remove the perfume.
There was so much blood. He was going to pass out.
He leaned a shoulder against the Dumpster and tried to focus on the remnants of her perfume that were left trailing in the air behind her. She headed back down between the buildings, and it seemed, though he couldn’t be sure, that she was stopping at the corner.
There was no more breathing from the roof. He tried to focus on the other roofs, where he knew the rest of the snipers were supposed to be, but it was too big of a plaza and he couldn’t be sure of anything. Sounds bounced back and forth.
Someone was running, their shoes smacking hard against the pavement. It couldn’t be Aubrey—she didn’t run when she was invisible because it made her so unsteady.
Jack moved out from the Dumpster and down the alley. He wasn’t walking in a straight line, and he knew that he wasn’t going to catch up with anyone.
Everything had fallen apart. This morning they’d been part of a team of Green Berets and now they were the enemy. They were terrorists. Laura had killed soldiers—she was defending Jack and Aubrey—and now no one would ever believe them. They were outlaws. They were exactly what Captain Rowley had thought they were when he pulled out that detonator. They were killers. It didn’t matter that Jack and Aubrey didn’t kill—he would have certainly killed Captain Rowley to save Aubrey’s life if he’d been able to do it. The fact that Laura did it instead didn’t make him any less complicit.
