Some will fill with ice and concrete grey
Cold and dark go on for days and days
Til the only thing that remains is the dirty rain
Nothing's really ever gold anymore, nothing shines like it did before
Flat and static paved in progress' name
What will all our little children say
When the only place to play is in the dirty rain?
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The air filled with ash and debris faster than I thought was possible—as I became more panicked, my breathing became quicker, and I choked against the hot soot as it singed my trachea. My head was still pounding, pulse like a drum in my ears, I didn't know where Gazzy was, the room had just exploded—
I think I cried out. The nurse who'd just been by my side was back there, her worried eyes piercing mine. Relax, she was trying to tell me. Her hand twitched in the direction of my restraints. I found myself wondering if she was a mother as I studied the warring expression on her face. She would never speak to me—could never, not after she was forced into this world of silence—but in the split second of reverie after the explosion and before my wits returned to me, I imagined that so much of who she was relied on her compliance with her employment here.
The reverie was over. Charlie roared up next to me through the haze, hands working dexterously to unfasten the leathers at my waist and knees. I was free in a moment and I log rolled off the table, landing in a crouch at its side.
I could barely see him, but I knew he was there. "If you see my daughter—" his voice broke off, as if he were unable to see the sentence through to the end.
As sorry as I felt for him and as thankful as I was, we didn't have time. I nodded shortly, sealing the promise with my body language, and closed the gap between Fang and I.
When I found him, his lips were pulled shut tightly, a grimace painted on his olive face. "You'd think it was a smoke bomb," he muttered. A cough ripped through his chest as I tore his restraints from him. "Alright?" he asked. I grunted in response.
Mallory was screaming from somewhere across the madness, and I saw Acton's sturdy form barreling through the grey toward us.
Fang launched himself forward with a grace typically only reserved for ballet dancers, cocking his fist back tightly before plunging it directly into the side of Acton's head. Fang managed to actually catch Acton off guard, the thicker of the two men listing to the side, balance eradicated completely by Fang's knuckles.
That punch from Fang was the first domino - the rest was history from there for Acton. I threw myself at him, finding myself straddling his waist, punches flying from me as if my arms were a separate, motorized entity. I don't know how long I stayed there for - years, probably - just absolutely whaling on him.
I pictured Mallory's filthy ponytail, his puked-up seaweed eyes, his greasy complexion. But it was Acton's fair features I pounded into, blood coming away on my fists like sap from a tree during syrup season.
Acton was tough and strong, a trained fighter that had been with EU probably almost as long as the boss himself had been. He knew all of my moves and had been the cause of nearly as many injuries as Mallory.
As powerful as he was, nothing was going to outlast the fury bubbling beneath my skin and pounding through my vessels; this place had taken enough from me, and if I was given another chance of a lifetime to get out of here, nobody was getting in my way.
There was a rustle from behind me and then Fang was at my side sporting a split cheek and a frown. I registered his features in my periphery. The low, smooth rumble of his voice rolled somewhere in the back of my head, but I couldn't make out his words as I continued to wail on Acton.
I couldn't stop staring at the blood. It was wedged beneath my fingertips, seeping into the tiny cuts between my fingers—
A wave of nausea overcame me and I sort of toppled to the side off Acton's abdomen, steadying myself against the concrete floors with bloodied hands. Fang pulled me further to the side and gripped my shoulder tightly in one hand.
"Max."
His voice finally started making sense and I forced my chin up to meet his eyes amid the chaos. My gaze started trailing to Acton—there was so much blood—and Fang grabbed my chin in his free hand, forcing me to look at him.
"Let's go," he said firmly. There was something I couldn't quite place behind the stony determination in his irises. Vaguely, somewhere deep, I wondered if it was fear.
I nodded once and let him pull me to my feet.
"There are tons of soldiers around here," said Fang, pulling me through the smoke. "I took a couple of them out."
A couple. There was a mess of bodies scattered across the floor.
"Where's Gazzy?" I managed.
He didn't answer.
My left hand was gripped in Fang's as he pulled me toward some unseen destination, but a stranger poked at my right one and I withdrew it quickly, turning on my heel with a defensive snarl.
It was that nurse again—she was probably in her thirties but her huge, periwinkle-blue eyes gave her a sense of horrified naivete. She blinked and tugged me toward her. Every fiber of my being screamed trust no one, but I followed her anyway, wrenching my hand out of Fang's when he didn't oblige to my pulling.
Fang grabbed back at my wrist and moved to yank me back into him. "Max—!"
The hand went slack as the nurse led us to the Gasman himself, smothered in blankets on a hospital bed, looking so much like the eight-year-old I remembered him most dearly as. He was still pale but looked considerably less sickly than he had even hours before.
"Thank you," I breathed to the nurse, and she only nodded, turning her head toward the source of the smoke before disappearing into it.
"Fang, we need to get him out of—"
There was another roaring explosion from behind us somewhere followed by a rush of heat. I turned in time to watch flames lick the far side of the medical wing before the wall collapsed in on itself.
"The building is going to come down," Fang called from behind me, his face covered in sweat and determination. His thick hair was matted down on the sides of his head and he was covered in dirt and ash; wildly, I imagined that this was Mt. Vesuvius and we would be preserved here indefinitely if we didn't make it out—
I turned back to the Gasman, prepared to drag him by his ear to safety if I needed to, and found his bed empty.
Then I heard a familiar growl.
Mallory.
The smoke began to clear toward the ceiling and I had a split second of recognition as I stared across the room. The pistol I'd seen holstered so many times was drawn from its safe place on his hip and instead sat parallel against the Gasman's temple. Gazzy was unconscious, his lanky form pulled off the ground and tight to Mallory's chest. The gun was loaded. It always was.
And he'd use it. I knew he would.
"No—" I choked out, darting forward toward him. "Take me—Mallory, don't you dare—"
The lights cut out. A gunshot rang out into the air; singular, pure.
Then a siren began blaring.
"Gazzy!" It was a wail from somewhere deep in my soul, splitting the air like the roar of a fighter jet. "No!"
There were fingertips on the back of my arm then, feather-light and dusting—when I fought them, they were long and painful against my upper arm. "Max." It was Iggy's voice. A hiss. My heart soared at the familiar rumble of his voice. "You need to trust me. The building is going to—"
I was dizzy from the blackness and the scream of the siren made my head pound even more painfully. "Gazzy!"
Iggy's hands were fisted in the back of my shirt and I instinctively fought against him. He held me close to him and I heard the familiar fwip! of a switchblade and a million absurd thoughts immediately shot through my head.
Before any of them could come to fruition in the form of action, the zip ties tight against my wings were cut away and Iggy's giant hand was gripping mine for dear life.
There was another cry from across the room that I recognized as Nudge—I couldn't see anything, couldn't differentiate sounds or tell where they were coming from—Iggy was pulling me away from something, towards the heat—
And I had never been more certain that I was going to die.
Another gunshot.
Where was Fang?
The lights cut back in just as I was literally thrown into the air by Iggy's ropy arms—"Fly!" he demanded—and the second I forced my wings wide open, the building below me exploded into flames, leaving nothing but a decimated field in the middle of the thick forestry.
Powerful waves of energy from the blast forced me further into the air, so I folded my wings in and let myself be carried by the current. My ears popped as I shot backward. I stared down at the chaos, trying to focus my blurred vision on Iggy's form careening toward me in the midnight air.
The cloudy blues of his irises were barely visible beyond the blown vacuums of his pupils. Just as the momentum of the explosion stopped carrying me he was there, arms under me and pulling me tight to him. I'd never seen him looked so panicked.
My stomach was rolling and I could hear my pulse throbbing in my ears but nothing else—I tried to say something but couldn't hear my own voice, so instead I gestured wildly to the burning ground below me.
But Iggy was streaking through the sky away from the explosion, unable to see my gestures and too focused on his own task at hand to pay attention to what I may be trying to indicate.
Sounds returned slowly. When I dug my fingernails into his back, Iggy slowed down, ghosting his fingertips over the inside of my wrist as if feeling for a pulse. "What, Max?"
I tried to free myself from his arms but his grasp on me was too tight. A frustrated growl tore from the center of my chest and I glared at him. His eyes narrowed in response.
We landed a couple hundred yards away from the remains of EU. Iggy placed me in the dewy grass and assessed me for damage. His hands found my swollen nose and he grimaced. "This might be crooked forever. Jesus Christ, who punched you? No wonder you sound concussed."
I elected to not answer. "How did you find us?"
The question seemed to pull the pair of us away from the reality of the situation. A toothy grin split Iggy's face and he pulled me into a crushing hug. He, too, elected not to answer. "I'm just happy you're alive."
"Iggy," I rasped, but there was another explosion and we both whipped our heads around to face it.
Reality was back. "Later," he barked. "I need to go back there. Stay where you—"
"Iggy," I repeated, this time in a warning tone. "If you think I'm going to sit here—"
"You're concussed, you're hurt, and you're what they want. You need to—"
A white figure crashed into the grass in front of us and it took me a dazed moment to recognize that it was Angel. She was on her feet again in a nanosecond, curls tied up in a snarled ponytail at the top of her head. When she spoke, her voice was thick with tears; subconsciously, I reached a hand out to her. "We got separated," she cried, panicked, "I can't find Gazzy anywhere."
Iggy's eyebrows nearly hit the troposphere. A hand raked through his hair, making it dance atop his head like the unruly flame we'd left behind us. His albatross wings shot open, stiff and wide against his back. I'd seen them a million times before, but the sheer size of them would always take my breath away.
"What do you mean you got separated? Angel—" Iggy looked positively flustered, which was not unlike him during times of high stress. Still, I hadn't seen him take out his frustration on the younger kids since I'd been back.
"I know!" Angel wailed. "I tried—but I couldn't see through the smoke…" She continued to babble on, tears leaking from her perfect eyes.
Iggy was floating in the air and I snapped my own wings open to hover next to him. We rose above the tree line and I felt my lungs fill with air when I saw them, just silhouettes in the moonlight.
It was Nudge I saw first, her mess of hair wide and chaotic in the humidity. Another slightly lankier figure was hanging beneath her; her hands were wrapped underneath their armpits and they swayed dangerously in the night air.
The Gasman. Against all odds, she was carrying the Gasman through the sky.
Just behind her was a shape I'd always recognize as Fang, but something about his figure was off. Iggy cocked his head to the side. "Somebody's crying."
As Fang approached, it became clearer. Allie had her hands clasped around his neck in a death grip, sobbing wildly into the air. The nurse who'd been there with me in the medical wing was cradled in his arms, but she wasn't moving, skin white as a sheet in the midnight.
Nudge approached but didn't wait for us to greet her-she adjusted her beautiful wings a bit too drastically, forcing her to crash land in the grass next to Angel. She tumbled flat on her back with Gazzy draped awkwardly across her.
As Iggy dove to meet them, I rushed to intercept Fang. His shoulder was still popped out awkwardly, his face was littered with bruises, and he was bleeding openly from several parts of his body. But he was alive. Christ almighty, we were all alive.
Fang's eyes were fierce. A furious protectiveness I'd become well acquainted with in the past few days gave the normally serene oxford blue a terrifying undertone—we both had a million unanswered questions.
But first, we needed to get the hell out of there. I angled my wings toward the ground to land and he followed behind me.
As soon as my feet hit the grass, I knew several things were seriously wrong.
My immediate attention went to the Gasman, who was supine on the forest floor with Iggy hovering over him. Iggy's pale fingers danced across Gazzy's skin-the latter had always been fair, but Iggy typically made all of us look tanned. Now, Gaz was even sallower than Iggy.
"Gazzy," I breathed, but nobody seemed to hear me.
Iggy was muttering something about a fever. Angel was fretting over Nudge, who had a massive gash across her forehead. Nudge was insisting she was fine, swatting away Angel's invasive hands. "Iggy can stitch me later, I'm fine."
Fang was knelt next to the nurse. Aside from being unconscious, she looked otherwise no worse for the wear.
The only one of us who was untouched was Allie, who was curled into Fang's side and bawling into the older woman's lap. I thought this to be strange until I connected the similarities in the features of the two of them, the loose curls, the pointed chins and noses, the dimpled cheeks. The only distinctive difference between them was their eyes: the nurse's were a sky blue, like Iggy's, but Allie had Charlie's deep mahogany brown orbs.
"Mom," cried Allie.
And it all made sense.
There was entirely too much for my damaged brain to process; I couldn't decide whether to panic over the Gasman, hug Angel, stitch Nudge, fall to pieces thanking Iggy, or cry like a baby in relief for myself. Some deranged part of me settled on the least important of everything.
"Where's Charlie?" I forced out, some panicked note singing from the most maternal part of me. Fang tried to hide a grimace but didn't meet my eyes. One of his large, warm hands cupped Allie's trembling shoulder.
"Fang," I tried again.
Allie sobbed harder into her mother's singed shirt. It was all the answer I needed.
I sat cross-legged in the grass for a moment and then laid flat on my back.
Iggy was murmuring something to Nudge over Gazzy's still form. Angel sat beside them, legs hugged to her chest as she cried softly. Fang rose from his spot next to the nurse and Allie and padded over to me, expression tight with concern and exhaustion. The worry had already started to crease the skin by his eyes.
The corners of his mouth tightened as he knelt next to me and took my hand, thumb rubbing circles over my knuckles. He opened his mouth, ready to say something, but closed it after studying my face. The chapped pink of his lips blurred and I wondered if I was crying.
Iggy appeared behind him. "Let me set your shoulder," he said, but Fang shrugged him off.
Ig sighed. "We need to move." Fang nodded in agreement.
Eventually, their voices drifted, a million miles away in the underbrush. I felt a hand I knew to be Fang's at my shoulder shaking me, but I couldn't be bothered.
Sleep, something said. And I laid down and let the constellations dance behind my lids.
Song: "Dirty Rain" by Andrew Combs.