“Not from where I’m standing,” he answered, striding into the room to check her wound. “You need medical attention.”
“They said there’s a kit here.” Taking the gun he put in her hand, she tried to stay conscious as he disappeared, to return with a small metal box four minutes later.
“This installation is compact—I’ve cleared the entire area,” he told her before opening the kit and quickly cataloguing the items within. “Communications system is voice-code protected.”
Which meant it was out of their reach; voice code locks could be broken, but it took time and a very specific set of tech skills. “I think there’s a backup team on the way in a chopper.”
Aden gave a short nod to acknowledge her intel, but didn’t stop what he was doing. “The kit’s not advanced enough to fully take care of the gunshot injury, but I should be able to stop the major bleeding at least.” He took out a handheld scanner, tried to switch it on. “Dead. Water damage.” Throwing it aside, he picked up a disposable laser.
Biting down on a leather belt Aden pulled from one of the dead guards, she tried to contain her pain as all Psy were taught to do, but her mind wouldn’t cooperate. Aden looked up at her flinch. “Whatever is in our heads is interfering?”
She nodded, but told him to continue with her eyes.
He did, his jaw a brutal line. Why did he persist in believing himself Silent? He cared. Aden had always cared. It was the biggest open secret in the squad. It was why they all fought so furiously for him and with him. Because Aden came back for his people. He’d come back for her.
No one else might mourn or care for an Arrow, but Aden would. Aden did.
She knew that Marjorie Kai, the woman from whom Aden had inherited the Korean part of his heritage, would consider his capacity to care a black mark against him. Marjorie was an Arrow of old, one who’d helped set the rebellion in place—and who had given up her son to it when he was just a boy.
His Navajo-Japanese father, too, would say the same: Strength is control. Control is power.
Zaira had heard Naoshi Ayze say that at least a hundred times during the past five, going on six, years. Marjorie and Naoshi had settled in Venice after their “deaths” in an explosion at sea two decades past, and the compound there wouldn’t have existed without them. But while the squad owed them a great debt, Zaira had come to realize the two Arrows no longer understood the son they had created and shaped to be an avatar of rebellion.
Aden was stronger, better than both of them, and he followed his own path.
Throwing aside the laser when it burned out, he picked up another one from the kit, worked on her. There was pain, but it was the burn of the laser, the deep ache of being gutshot fading slightly.
“I think I’ve cauterized the major bleeds,” Aden told her, rebandaging both the entry and exit wounds using sterile gauze packs before making her drink two small bottles of a high-nutrient compound in the kit. Soon as she’d done that, he thrust a solid energy bar at her. “It’ll increase your energy levels, stave off unconsciousness.”
While she forced down the tasteless bar, he went looking for their boots. “Got them,” he said a couple of minutes later. “Socks were on the floor but they’re dry.”
He’d also unearthed a green camo canvas daypack and, once he’d pulled on his socks and boots, started filling the pack with any food he could find, the remaining medical supplies, and technical equipment they might be able to jerry-rig. “We’re in mountainous and heavily forested terrain, low visibility because of thick cloud cover and the fact it’s full night,” he told her. “A storm seems imminent. Strip the guards, put on as many extra warm layers as you can; ditch my jacket and find a rainproof one.”
Already moving, though she was sluggish compared to her normal speed, Zaira went to the guard who’d taken a bullet in the skull and fallen forward on his face, leaving his clothing mostly unbloodied.
“Here.” Aden threw her an olive green sweater from a small metal trunk he’d dragged over from around the corner. “Looks like their spare supplies.” Shrugging off the lightweight jacket he was wearing, he pulled on an identical sweater over bare skin, though what was baggy and loose on her sat easily across his broad shoulders. “It’s empty aside from a few more energy bars.”
Having unzipped and shrugged off the leather jacket, she put it back on over the woolen sweater. She could easily fit a heavier waterproof jacket over it. “Do they have sleeping bags?”
“No. I found pallets in a small room down that corridor.” He paused. “I think I saw a jacket that might not swamp you.”
Zaira made her way to that room while Aden stuffed the daypack with the last supplies and extra ammunition. The heavy hooded jacket she found hanging on a hook on the wall must’ve belonged to the short, slight guard who’d run outside after Aden. It was still large on her, but not so large as to be unmanageable. Seeing another thick, weatherproof jacket crumpled in the corner, she picked it up and shook it out, then scanned the room until she located a pair of gloves.
Aden had just finished packing the supplies when she got back. Nodding thanks for the jacket and gloves, he snapped closed the clasps on the daypack and began to get into the jacket. Her senses prickled fifteen seconds later, while he was zipping it up. “Let’s go. I hear a chopper.”
Aden didn’t argue, both of them aware her hearing was more acute than his—a simple genetic quirk that often gave her a slight advantage in stealth operations. Her father had once credited a long-ago changeling ancestor for that familial genetic trait. Zaira didn’t know if that was a true assertion or not, but she appreciated the usefulness of it.
Slinging on the daypack, Aden led the way out. The bodies of the guards sent to find him lay on the ground outside, their eyes staring at the sullen night sky and their skin leached of color. Ignoring them, Zaira and Aden made straight for the cover of the dark green firs that spread out in every direction around them, birch trees with lighter green leaves scattered in among them. Right now, intel wasn’t as important as survival.
Chapter 3
THE GROUND WAS uneven, rocky, as they ran, the air cold in her lungs but not knife sharp. Of course, that was now, right after she’d had an infusion of energy thanks to the drinks and the bar she’d eaten. The real test would come in an hour or two, when her injury began to make itself felt again. “Chopper’s about to land.” She could hear the jets that made it a high-speed vehicle. “Has to be a clearing nearby.”
“Probably a natural one. Nothing to raise suspicion to anyone doing a flyover.”
Shouts carried on the air soon afterward, but while this terrain might make for a good holding pen, it was so thickly forested that it also made for a very bad area to search. Especially when hunting two Arrows. Except one Arrow was badly wounded to the point that she was a liability.
“I’m slowing you down,” she said, her breath coming too hard and too fast for someone with her training and endurance.