Last to Rise(69)

It all came back into focus when the door opened and Jake walked in. My first thought was, How the hell am I going to tell her? And tell her it should have been me, not him? But the look on her face, the way it had closed off completely, iced over, told me she knew. She hadn’t needed anyone to tell her – she’d known anyway, because Pasha was no longer in her head, and I wondered how lonely that would be, to have silence when you’d had the comfort of that voice with you always.



Out of all the faces around me, hers was the only one with no hint of tears. Blood, yes, and mud, frustration and a dead, bone-achingly empty tiredness, but no tears. Pasha had done what he set out to do – somehow, and I wasn’t sure how right then, he had saved her. And boy was she pissed off about it.



I staggered to my feet, unsure what I was going to say, what I could say that would make any difference. How far would you go? How far would I go for her? Not as far as him, it had always been that way. That’s why she loved him, not me. Or one of the reasons anyway. But now I thought on what he had said about sacrifice, that it was supposed to hurt or what was the point? The Downside Goddess was big on sacrifice, on fighting the inevitable. If she existed, then Pasha should be getting a damned great reward right about now. But who had his sacrifice hurt more? Because Jake wasn’t crying, but there was something fragile just under her surface, obvious in the way she moved, as though she was suddenly made of glass. Like she would shatter if I said the wrong word.



I chickened out, afraid to break her even worse than she already was. My only consolation in all this was that I’d managed to get her a few weeks of happy with Pasha. Not much, but some. And yet maybe that was worse, because now she knew what she’d lost.



So like the coward I was, am, I said nothing and she drifted past me, pale and ghostly, empty of anything. I don’t think she even saw me, left us all behind in silence as she went to the machine room. She stayed there a long while.



Perak broke the silence in the end, first with a murmured prayer, and then pulling himself together and speaking out loud. “He bought us some time. He got Jake enough space, enough chaos to get out, and us some time. He did that, at least.”



“Time for what though? Arranging our funerals?” I tried not to let the bile out, but it was there and it dripped through every word. The stupidity of it, the sheer waste. Why, Pasha? We could have done something, could have got Jake out some other way that didn’t involve you dying, so why?



Goddess only knows what Perak was about to say, because Dendal had an attack of lucidity and his voice was unusually sharp. “To do what we have to, Rojan. What you have to. And if you don’t, I will.”



I stared at him, alarmed by the sudden strength of his voice. I half suspected he was going to go on about Goddess-given work, or what she expected of me, so I tried my best to deflect him because that always made me want to blast steam out of my ears.



“What happened, then? When Pasha… when he used the machine…”



“It worked. Partially,” Perak said. “Took out a small area of their men, helped us keep the gates because it scared the rest stupid. Helped Jake get away because the small group was the one holding her, and that’s all he wanted, I think. But they won’t stay scared, especially if they find out we aren’t using it again. And we are not using it again.”



He said it very matter-of-factly, and his eyes were steady on mine. “Are we clear on that?”



Like I was ever likely to go near the damned thing ever again. I didn’t even want to look at it, and I valued my own arse too much to contemplate using it now. “We’re clear.” And then, because thoughts were swirling around my head that I didn’t want to think, “And where are we? The Storad outside the gates?”



“Still there,” Malaki said. “They got spooked for a bit, but they won’t be long. Not long.”



“So what do we do?”



Perak sighed and the captain shook his head. “Whatever we can.”





Chapter Nineteen





Perak and Malaki went over what they knew, numbers of men, of guns, where they were, where the Storad had dug in, all the thousand and one details that someone needed to look over and I was glad it wasn’t me. Between the guards and recruits and Pasha, we’d held them off. For now.



Allit stirred in the corner of the office as far from Pasha’s desk as he could get, twisting his fingers. The pop as one dislocated seemed very loud, but what really got my attention was the look on his face as he saw whatever it was that he saw. Future, past, present? Concrete or shifting? We didn’t know for sure, but still, something was better than nothing.