“Holy shit,” Cheyenne hissed through her teeth, her arms sore from the tension of bearing through the pain, and then all the discomfort vanished.
She opened her eyes and wiped her hands off with the rags enough to see the perfectly healed flesh of her palms beneath. Sucks, but it works.
She gave herself another moment to recover from the exhaustion and the suddenly vanished pain in her hands, then she closed the salve jar and stuck both that and the bloody rags from Maleshi’s dress into her backpack. As she stood and slung the straps over her shoulders, a groaning shudder rippled through the wall of the classroom behind her. A thin shower of dust and plaster shivered down onto the rows of long tables stretching across the room, and Cheyenne headed quickly toward the door. The earthquake’s a lie, but the damage apparently is not. Time to get outta here.
On the way to meet up with Maleshi behind the building, she only passed two other people in the halls. One was a faculty member darting out of an office with a briefcase in one hand and a hastily snatched-up laptop and a stack of thin binders clutched to her chest. The other was a terrified-looking freshman with his fly still unzipped as he staggered out of the bathroom and stared in shock at the empty hallway.
Yeah, that’d be the worst place to experience an earthquake. Cheyenne almost laughed but managed to hold it together. “You okay?”
“I don’t know.” The kid blinked at her, then looked down at his soaked pants and dripping shoes. “I fell over, and I think I broke something in there.”
“In the bathroom?” Cheyenne nodded and pressed her lips together, trying not to visibly flare her nostrils at the smell. Kid fell into the urinal. “You’ll be fine. Maybe go home and grab a change of clothes, huh? Or at the very least, just make sure you get out of the building and away from this area of campus just in case.”
“Yeah.” The shocked kid turned stiffly, arms spread by his sides as he waddled down the hall and left shallow wet footprints behind him.
She gave him a two-minute head start so as not to further humiliate him and hoped he was already out the front door by the time she reached it. He was. Cheyenne didn’t see him anywhere when she skirted around the front of the Computer Sciences building again.
She stared at the closed-up crack that probably still held a burgeoning portal ridge beneath it and the two mounds of ruptured earth around the diggers’ holes just in front of the fissure. Man, that looks really bad.
When she rounded the corner behind the building, Cheyenne slowed and tried not to trip over the invisible war machines on the thin grass. Maleshi stood beside her rolling briefcase with the metal handle in its perpetually upright position, her phone in hand. “With a minute to spare. Look at you.”
“That wasn’t a firm ten minutes anyway.”
“You don’t know. But I’m glad you didn’t try to take some kind of drow shortcut, thinking you could solve all our problems on your own.”
“What?” Cheyenne folded her arms.
“Just that you didn’t waste any time. That’s all.”
“Yeah, that’s not what you meant. Go ahead, General.” Maleshi snorted at her former student using the nightstalker’s former title, but Cheyenne only raised an eyebrow. “If you have something to say, better say it now and get it off your chest.”
Maleshi glanced quickly around them and stepped closer. “I get that tensions are high, and you don’t agree with every decision made by those of us fighting this fight for you.”
“With me.”
“Right. Yeah.” The nightstalker dipped her head and lifted both hands in surrender. “With you. That being said, kid, I’m not a big fan of you and the fae going off on your own to interrogate someone for ridiculously sensitive information you couldn’t even prove was legit first. Without telling the rest of us.”
“That’s what you’re pissed about?” Cheyenne laughed and shook her head. “I don’t need to ask permission to do something I know has to be done. And I’m not going to.”
“Not asking permission, Cheyenne.” The general returned her attention to her phone and pulled up the number she wanted. “Anyone who thinks they can control you by giving or withholding permission is a complete idiot.”
Like the FRoE.
“I’m just talking about you telling us what’s happening before it happens and not after. You don’t know if we might have some tool or tactic or information that could help you do whatever you’re trying to do. And no, I’m not talking about the tactics you’ve already made perfectly clear you don’t approve of.” Maleshi waited until Cheyenne finally turned her head and met the nightstalker’s human-looking green eyes. “We’re in this together—all of us. And I can tell you right now that L’zar’s already screwed up enough on his own by going wherever he wants, doing whatever he wants, and leaving the rest of us to pick up the pieces because he never bothered to lay out a plan first. Even if it was just to say, ‘Hey. This is happening. Gotta go.’”
The halfling chewed the inside of her bottom lip. “So he’s been leaving the warehouse and putting us all at risk, then.”
“No, kid. I’m talking about that drow’s entire existence, from birth to holing up in that warehouse. We want to help you. Kinda hard to do when we don’t know what’s going on.”
“Yeah, okay. I get it.”
“Mmhmm.”
“Seriously. I’ll call next time I end up going after corporate CEOs to intimidate them into giving up the names of their
