XXXIII: Day Nine, Early Morning.
Icarus Devereux, 17
Applicant #10
Every single part of him is just throbbing.
His leg worst of all, predictably, but his head too and the space behind his eyes, his fingertips when he presses his fingers even remotely close to the gash in his thigh.
His brain is throbbing because of all of this nonsense; first Percy and then the Sentinel, now Emmi showing up and spewing off things about a plan it doesn't even look like she entirely understands. Ria is the only one who looks mildly convinced of this so-called plan's integrity, but she's also the one that's going to have to execute it.
"So, let me get this straight," he says. "You're going to blow up our car?"
"Ours is in better shape."
"That car is my home," Soran says.
"This is exactly why I called you a homeless person," he reminds him, and Soran scoffs. "Seriously, though, that truck is a piece of shit."
"Yours has a bigger gas tank," Ria says. "And more gas in general."
"So..."
"Bigger boom," she explains, which is the dumbed-down version for his sake. She probably has a long-winded, technical explanation for it that he wouldn't understand a word of, so he doesn't bother asking. Besides, she looks too busy, fiddling around with Emmi's bracelet and pulling out pins from it, lighting matches that get far too close to anyone's skin for Icarus' liking.
He looks to Soran, who is also watching with a half-hearted interest. "Yours is next."
"Maybe not," Ria murmurs.
"Excuse me?" he asks. "I got mine off without you, I can get his too."
"That's not what I'm saying," Ria says, eyes betraying her sudden nervousness. "I just... I don't know that the tracking still works once it's off, and we need them to be able to find us, so we might want to leave his own for a while.
"Alright," Soran says, getting to his feet, as if it's that simple. "What do you need? Rope? How much?"
"Enough to get away before the car explodes."
"Lots, got it. Anything else?"
"Gas, if you can find it. Not necessary but it would be useful."
He gives a thumbs up on his way out of the alley but Icarus is the only one looking, the only one that sees it.
Apparently the only one who cares.
He waits a few moments before he gets up and follows him at a painfully slow limp, trying not to look too desperate in the middle of all of this. Sure, he's chasing after him seconds after he left almost as if he doesn't want to be left alone with these too, but it can't look that terrible.
Soran's pace is stellar, though, when it hurts to even take a step.
"Can you slow down for a second?" he calls after him, and Soran stops dead in the middle of the road until Icarus can catch up to him. He grabs him by the arm, stopping his forward momentum the second he sees Icarus by his side.
"Are you actually okay with all of this?"
"You're gonna have to be more specific."
"They're tracking you. Just you."
"What does it matter? We're all together anyway."
"Exactly!" he hisses. "You don't think they know that if we're all together, not killing each other, that we're trying to pull a fast one on them?"
Soran rolls his eyes. "I'd hope they have the mental capacity to assume that, yeah."
"Listen to me," he insists, and shakes his arm like that's going to help. "If they really do show up, you're going to be the easiest one to find."
"And?"
He releases his arm to press his hands into his eyes until it hurts, beyond exasperated. "Do you ever actually listen to me?"
"More than you'd probably think."
"Then actually hear me! If they find you first, and it's all of them, you're going to die."
Soran actually has the gall to look mildly offended at that, and if it wouldn't hurt him Icarus would grab him by both shoulders and jerk him back and forth until something properly aligned in his brain for once. He just doesn't understand that he's in a level of danger no one else really is, that he's already hurt and vulnerable, that Icarus has gotten to the point where he really doesn't want him to die after all of this.
"Have some faith in me," Soran says.
"I'd like to, but—"
"But nothing," Soran interrupts. "Neither of us are going to die, you know why? Because we're going to find some rope and whatever else she needs and we're going to set this all up before they get here. Not stand around talking in the middle of the street until the fucking sun comes up like we're waiting for them to run us over. Okay?"
"Before they get here," he mutters. "Hopefully."
"We will. You take that side of the street, I'll look through this one."
"The last time I left you alone you got your ass handed to you."
"You're going to be thirty feet away from me."
Soran turns and heads away, ducking into the building directly to their right. He turns likewise, limping his way to the building ten paces down the road, two stories high. He really doesn't want to do stairs right now.
Just as he ducks into the building he sees Ria in the street, picking her way through the tangle of brush at the side to head after Soran. She probably doesn't want to follow Icarus after all - he's not the one willingly helping, the active participant. With her out there it means she most definitely got Emmi's bracelet off. The number on Soran's bracelet was still stuck on four; thing's definitely broken, or maybe they're being screwed with. Most likely both.
He's definitely being screwed with, for one. Is he the only one that thinks this could go remotely wrong? Sure, he's never been the most optimistic of people, but this has to be a new low for the course of his brain.
Besides, this first building he's in has approximately fuckall in it. Are they even going to find what they need? Rope seems like a pretty simple thing, you would assume, but when paired with a not-so simple task it suddenly grows in convolution.
He just has to think about what Soran said. They have to do this fast, before the Sentinels get here. One's already dead in the alley behind them, their doing.
How many more were there? How many people do they still need to kill?
To be honest he can't even recall that day, sitting in that tiny, almost classroom like environment, staring at them all in front of him. There were more than he would have liked, but he can't recall a number. It wouldn't be that easy. What he remembers most of all is Soran looking Carnelia in the eye, unflinching, and it feels like that all just led up to this.
And he can't help himself from staring out the lone broken window, either, as if it's already happening.
As if on cue, there's a noise from across the road. The sound of something falling over or breaking. It's loud in the otherwise deathly silence.
What's worse is the scream two seconds after. A noise he knows for a fact didn't come out of Ria's mouth. Who knows where Emmi is, either.
He knows exactly who that came from, tragically.
He trips out of the side door to the building and nearly faceplants in the dirt in his haste to get back across the road. Thirty feet, Soran said, like thirty feet wasn't too bad. How bad could it really be?
Bad, evidently.
The scream cuts off quickly, as does any other source of noise. By the time he staggers into the building across the road he's prepared himself for the worst thing he can possibly imagine. In it's head, it isn't pretty.
Upon first glance, it doesn't look anywhere near that bad.
Soran's on the ground, that much is clear. There's a little shelf knocked over in front of him like he hit it on his way down; Ria is hovering over him, anxiously flailing her hands back and forth, not doing much of anything. And there's blood, too, not very much but more than there has any right to be considering he left him alone for five fucking minutes.
"What did you do?" he snaps, rushing to crouch by his side. Soran doesn't move, forehead pressed to the concrete, but Ria leaps back, eyes wide.
"I didn't do anything! I think— I think it's shocking him, I don't—"
That theory is proven exactly right when he puts a hand on his shoulder to do... nothing, really, and something shocks him so severely that he rips his hand away with a yelp. Soran goes still, abruptly, all the convulsions stopping at once.
All the blood is coming from his wrist, from somewhere underneath the bracelet.
"Okay, yeah, you need to get it off," he says. "I don't care what you think—"
"I think those pins are burrowing into his skin!" Ria cries. "I can't do anything about that!"
He can't even see to tell if that's the truth. The blood is coming faster by the second. Soran's biting so hard into his lip that there's blood from there, too, and he reaches forward to grab his wrist.
"Don't," Soran chokes. "Don't, don't—"
He feels it again, a second before it starts. The tremor, the beginning of the current, and this time he hears it too, the irritating buzz of the electricity a second before Soran convulses again as it pulses all the way up his arm and into the rest of him. He can't even hold on long enough to do anything before it hurts too bad, ripping his hand away once again.
"What the fuck is going on?" Emmi asks from the door, and he whirls around for a few seconds before he settles back on Soran, who looks as if he's about to pass out any second now.
"Get it off," he manages, once the electricity stops again. "Just—"
"It's digging into your fucking arm, what do you want me to do?"
"Get if off," he repeats, voice edging into desperation. He hooks an arm under his chest as he goes to collapse to the ground, finally.
"Knife," he says, unsure of what he's going to do with one just yet but knowing that he has to do something beyond anything else. "Someone—"
Emmi all but slaps a knife into his other hand, quicker than even he expected.
"Oh my God," Ria mumbles.
"Go find some fucking rope instead of just standing there!" he yells finally. "They obviously know we're doing something if they're trying to kill him already; we need to do this now. Go."
She disappears quicker than any human being has any right to, which leaves Emmi standing there staring at him actually slightly concerned, for once.
"What do you want me to do?"
"I don't know."
"You can't hold onto him," she insists, taking a few steps closer. Just as she says it he feels it again, another buzz followed by a bout of electricity, and it shoots right through Soran's chest and into the arm he has hooked around it. It fucking paralyzes him, makes all his muscles lock tight and he wants to scream but can't even manage that.
Emmi tugs him away, finally, none too gently, and he watches Soran faceplant with a thud into the ground, his more intact arm failing to catch him on the descent.
He spends a few seconds gasping once the electricity is gone until he has a voice again. "I need to... I can't get it off, he'll keep moving."
"Then do it quick before it happens again."
He can't even see how many pins there are that must be digging into his skin. Ria pulled one out of Emmi's bracelet, maybe an inch long, in order to get the clasp open. There has to be more than that for there to be this much blood, but how many really? The metal is locked tight around his skin, reddening the exposed skin where it's not covered in blood.
He waits for it to happen again, for the electricity to snap back on as if it's working through a loop. This time Soran barely moves, as if his body no longer has the energy to fight it.
And then as soon as it stops, he digs the knife into his skin.
There's no space between the bracelet and his wrist. The blade slices into skin, spills more blood out over the pavement. He hears receding footsteps, vaguely, but is too focused on wedging the blade up between metal and skin until he creates a big enough space to wedge two of his fingers into. He can feel one of the pins, only slightly bigger than a needle, and drags it back until it rips free of his skin. The bracelet stays, though.
Of course there's more than one.
He gets one more out before the next bout of electricity, and this time Soran chokes out another awful noise, worse than the scream he heard from across the road because it sounds so drained, so weak already.
There's only one left. He can see it, where it's digging into the underside of his wrist. He wedges the knife in again, rips open more skin. This time he has the dig the tip of the knife all the way in to even loosen it.
"Don't pass out," he says, for his benefit or Soran's own, he's not sure. He just says it while he can still see his eyes open.
The pin pops out, tears another hole in his wrist. With nothing left to hold it shut the bracelet all but falls apart, metal tinkering to the ground between them.
"Okay," he says. "Okay, okay, fuck."
He drops the knife. There's so much blood it's overwhelming to look at, and he's not sure what caused more of it. Him, or the bracelet itself. He just cut ribbons into his skin to get it off.
He wraps one hand around the worst of the gashes there and grabs his jaw with the other, forcing his head up. His eyes are hardly open.
"You're okay," he says, even though he doesn't really believe it. Soran shakes his head, sort of, but his head really just weakly lolls into Icarus' hand and then stays there, not doing much of anything.
"I can't feel my hand," he mumbles, all the words jumbled together. "It's numb."
"That's okay," he answers, even though that's definitely not okay. What did that thing just do to him - what did he just do to him?
"Here," Emmi says, and he jolts. She drops her bag nearly on him, holding up some scrap of clothing that he can't put a name to, and then pulls Soran's arm from his slippery grip to wrap the fabric all the way around it. It's truly telling that he doesn't even put up a fight, laying there unmoving when she passes his arm back, when he wraps his fingers around again and presses as hard as he can.
"I think Ria found something," she adds. "She was halfway down the road, I couldn't really understand her."
"Okay." It feels like he's said that a lot without ever having a reason for it. "Okay?"
"I'm gonna go help her. If she has the rope we'll set it up. Just stay here with him."
He nods, dumbly, until she gets up and leaves the both of them, the bag abandoned by his side. It looks like there's a first-aid kit in there that she left for them. That'll probably be helpful once the bleeding stops.
If it stops.
"Is then when you say I told you so?" Soran gets out. His jaw is still tense under Icarus' hand.
"I don't like hearing you like this. Stop talking."
"Like what?"
"Shut up."
Soran mumbles something that sounds suspiciously like rude but he can't really tell, is stringing together coherent sentences for him as is. He can feel his pulse, too fast, but at least it's not gone. He has that.
Little victories?
He really hates this.
"I hate this," he says aloud, and Soran hums in agreement, which seems easier than talking. Don't get him wrong, he wants to hear the sound of his voice, likes the reassurance that he's well and alive, but it just sounds too off. He can't even remember what Soran sounded like nine days ago because he's grown so used to this awful version instead, the one that suffers and lies at Icarus' feet in agony because he has no other option.
Blood is starting to soak through whatever it is that he's holding onto.
"I told you so," he lets himself say, finally, but the tension in his chest doesn't release like he expected it to. Soran smiles and he feels it, sees all the blood in his teeth and heavy on his tongue.
Icarus can taste it too. He doesn't think he should be able to.
It's all they're made of, these days.
Emmi Langlois, 17
Applicant #13
"I got it!" Ria shouts, waving two lengths of rope in her hands as if Emmi can't fucking see it. "I got it! Is he—"
"Alive, yes, and I will confirm nothing else," she interrupts. "Let's go."
Ria works really well when she has a task, especially one that no one else is even close to being an expert in. Her being frazzled right now is something Emmi needs approximately zero of, not when they have something to do.
"If we tie them together they'll definitely be long enough. Whoever lights it will just have to be fast."
"So me, great," she mutters. "Any gas?"
"No. We can use some extra from one of the cars and douse them, though."
She really didn't want to be the one to light the damn thing. To be honest she was hoping Soran would do it, but that's definitely not happening now. Icarus is limping like it's his honest to god job and although Ria isn't, anymore, she's still not walking as fast as Emmi knows she could be, and whether that's because of the swelling or the fact that she's only in possession of one shoe, Emmi isn't sure.
"I'll need to move the truck down the road, first, and then I can park the two others close together. That should work, right?"
"Even bigger boom," Ria agrees. "When the first one goes it should light up the other one too."
"Sounds great to me. You good here?"
Ria nods, jittery, but her hands are already working at the ends of the two different lengths of rope, tying the beginning of a series of knots even as they approach the cars once again. Emmi leaves her to it and hops back into the truck and turns it the other way down the road, searching out a good place to tuck it away, somewhere not too far.
She ends up wedging it in the narrow gap between two buildings, such a tight squeeze that she touches both the nearest wall and the car door on her way out, inching her way back into the open road. There's a very disgusting looking dumpster at one end, half-blocking the car from view. They could still get out that way, if need be, but you'd have to look closely to even know it was there.
There's no sign of movement from Soran and Icarus' end - she stares at their little building on the way by but is too zeroed in on Ria pulling the coil of rope back out of the gas tank to wonder what could possibly be going on, gas splattering all over the ground.
She makes sure not to distract her, watches her loop the rope around the gas cap and then the outer panel before she starts backing up with it in her hands. The rope, at most, is twenty-five feet long when she finally stops and sets the end gently on the ground, as if it's dangerous already.
Then again, it really is.
"You got matches?" she asks, which feels like something she should have asked first, but Ria steps over the rope and gently drops a half-empty matchbook in her hands, gnawing on her lip.
"Wouldn't have suggested this if I didn't."
"Right," she says. "I'm gonna move the other car. Where to?"
"More into the alley, but leave a gap so they can still get in to check it out. The fire should trap whoever comes in the alley."
And her, too, because it's a dead end in the other direction. She checked, which also came with the lovely discovery of Percy's one-handed corpse.
Soran's insistent that part wasn't his doing; she doesn't have the energy to tell him that she knows, that she saw Percy alive and breathing not all that long ago.
It hurts too much to admit for someone she hardly knew at all.
"You can cut through the building on the left side and get back out into the road," Ria says, like a god-damned mind reader. "We'll probably have to wait in the building anyway, to make sure it works."
"And what if it doesn't?" she asks. "What if it doesn't kill them all, or if they're not close enough?"
Emmi won't lie - she's pretty damn confident in this plan for someone who was as good as dead nearly a week ago, lying in the bottom of a canyon with a tree branch stuck in her side. But there's still that thought in the back of her mind regardless. What are they going to do, if there's still enemies left alive after all of this?
"You have a gun," Ria says.
"So do Soran and Icarus."
She swallows. "You might want to make sure they're like... ready to shoot, or whatever. I guess."
"Locked and loaded," she mutters, and Ria gives her a terribly awkward thumbs up, mouthing those words under her breath a few times as if she wished she had started there to begin with. They all probably wish they could have said something different, at this point, or done something sooner, later, anything that would have made all this better.
"I'm gonna go get them," Ria says quietly. "If you wanna keep watch."
"Sounds good to me."
Ria quickly turns, hands shoved in her pockets. Her gait is so awkward it's almost hilarious to watch, the uneven angle of her legs with one shoe on and one missing, the swollen curve of her ankle.
"Hey!" she calls after her, and Ria stops in the road. "How the hell are you alive?"
It's rich, coming from her. She shouldn't be alive either. But she is, miraculously, and so is Ria. The four of them are practically walking miracles.
"Tarquin," Ria says, and nothing else, and her lip is already bloody when she goes to gnaw at it once again so she shoves a finger in her mouth instead, gnawing at the skin around her nails. Emmi doesn't expect anything else, and she doesn't get it either. It's clear that Tarquin isn't alive, definitely was when he somehow saved her life. She saw the antivenom firsthand. That came from somewhere.
It's beginning to sound more and more like Tarquin died because of that missing somewhere.
Ria turns to go once again. This time, she lets her. There's no point in asking any more questions.
They've all got ghosts, now. Multiples that are lurking after them, following them down every road and watching their every movement. After today they could have a hell of a lot more, and she hopes that's the case.
Ghosts are one thing. Dying is another. She'd rather have the ghosts.
She's sure all of them would answer the same way at this point.
Emmi sits on the roof for the better part of two hours.
Not enough for the sun to rise. No, it's still pitch black, which is sort of nice. It feels safer.
She pulled the car around like Ria suggested and climbed on the roof, got comfortable when she saw Icarus drag Soran out of the building across the road with Ria hovering at their heels. It was clear none of them were going to do it.
She had to do everything around here, obviously.
Ria last came out an odd forty-five minutes ago presumably to check on her but hadn't said anything, disappearing as quickly as Emmi laid eyes on her. It's Ria that appears this time once again, leaning away from the broken door to find her once again.
"What are the other two doing?"
"Icarus is taking a nap, I think, and Soran's been staring at the wall for an hour."
"A nap," she says slowly. "Why am I not surprised?"
Ria shrugs. "He looked pretty tired."
"We're all tired," she mutters. If she has to sit out here much longer she's going to insist that someone switch with her, give her a little break.
Ria doesn't leave this time like she expects her to, lingering around the back of the car, glancing across the foothills and the mountains. She looks very small wrapped in such a large sweater. Even her leg looks almost a normal size from this angle.
She feels compelled to say something, anything, but not a single word comes to mind. Emmi doesn't really know her, and if they're both going to die then there really isn't a point, is there? After, maybe, when it's safer. When it doesn't feel like it will just be ripped away from her the second she dares try.
"You see that?" Ria asks a few minutes later, and her voice is so deceptively calm that she thinks nothing of it until she looks to the left, towards two sets of lights off in the hills, pointed this way.
She stares, watches. The lights get a fraction of a hair bigger, the cars they must belong to slowly forming shape in the night.
She tosses the truck's keys back to Ria. "Wake them up."
"I don't think Soran's asleep."
"Well, get them both up, then. Up up. On their feet. One of them has to drive. You'll all beat me to the car."
Ria nods, fiddling with the keys. "If this works..."
"Thanks in advance."
"And if it doesn't?"
"I'll see you on the other side, hopefully."
She nods again, something she seems to do quite a bit of, but Emmi can't complain. The other two are just laying around - at least Ria has the decency to come out here and do anything at all.
She slips down to the front hood and then off the car, back into the dirt. Her legs tingle with feeling when she lands, but she'd take that feeling any day over being dead, and who knows how long they really have left. It may not be very long at all.
"Go back inside," she says. "Stay where I can see you."
Once again she gets a nod before Ria ducks back inside but this time she follows, just enough. The last bit of rope isn't even five feet away from the door; all she has to do is stay hidden behind the car, light the match, and then take off as fast as she can.
And then pray, really, but she'll get there.
They've got more than one bracelet for tracking, now. Hers abandoned in the front seat, Soran's dropped in the middle of the road just in front of them in case they can't quite figure it out.
They have to expect something. In reality Emmi isn't expecting much of anything with how terribly this could go. They just need a little bit of help - she can finish it off, if it comes to. Finish them off. She knows everyone else will do the same if it comes to that.
She crouches down in the doorway and lights a match, experimentally, dragging it up against the side of the box until a flame lights, heat tickling against her fingertips. It would be so easy to lean forward now and do it, to turn everything into fire.
But not yet. Just a little while longer.
The flame eventually goes out of its own volition, extinguished by the wind. She tosses it behind her back into the building, far away from the dangerous trails of gas that are laid out in front of her.
Soran looks at her from the far end of the room by the back door, still with a dazed sort-of look in his eyes but with a raised eyebrow.
A question she doesn't have an answer for. How far?
She won't dare to get up and find out.
Emmi has no idea how long the four of them linger there in silence, until the quiet suddenly isn't so quiet anymore, the quiet, even purr of a car approaching from the south. She ducks even further into the doorway clutching the matchbook. It's impossible to see almost anything from this angle but she can still hear the two distinctive noises, two different vehicles.
Slowly, steadily, getting closer.
Her chest aches with how quiet she's keeping her breathing as if that alone will give them away. They have to know, that she's convinced of, but not everything. The extent of their plan is theirs alone.
They stop in the road ahead and finally she sees a set of wheels, just the edge, underneath their own cars. Not for much longer, hopefully. They won't be so useful when they're blown to smithereens, smoking into the night sky. It's about the most optimistic thought she's had in a while.
She waves a hand backwards, communicating something without words. It better be enough.
A person emerges from one of the vehicles, and then another from the one behind it. She can't tell who, isn't sure it matters anyway. They all need to die regardless of who they are. A face doesn't matter. She just needs to wait for as many of them to get close as possible.
They don't even know how many there are. Just as many as humanly possible.
She inches out of the doorway at a snail's pace, practically dragging herself through the dirt. They won't be able to see her here as long as they all stay on their feet, as long as they don't come around this way to investigate.
The rope is still faintly damp with gas, snaking away through the dirt and then into the gas tank up above her, hanging ominously overhead.
It's a good thing she doesn't have to get that close.
Finally another pair of legs. That's three. She brings herself back to that room, to Carnelia Trevall lecturing them all like a goddamn school teacher. Her, the two with the red and oddly-white hair. The two other guys. Soran and Icarus got the other two. The other brunette; she killed the first. That's five. Percy and Winnie killed that other woman... is there really only six? She doesn't know. What if more have died than any of them know?
It's just the three pairs that she can see. Any closer and she'll have to do it regardless of numbers.
A fourth, finally. A few seconds later. The other two could be lurking about, unseen. She has the opportunity to kill four right now.
Even if there are some left... she has to take that risk. One of them is just in front of the car. A few more steps and they'll be able to see her if they come this way.
Close enough, she decides.
She strikes another match. The flame burns to life behind the shelter of her hand and she lowers it to the end of the rope, watches the fire catch and race all the way up at a breakneck speed.
Someone, she doesn't see who, glances around the edge of the car just as she lunges to her feet and takes off.
Up the single step, into the building, just in time to see the others take off out the back door.
She doesn't even make it to the door, but she didn't expect to.
Still, it happens faster than she expected.
She hears a hiss, an odd rattle.
Fire erupts behind her.
The explosion practically throws her out the door.
Isperia Martorell, 16
Applicant #17
The fireball and it's blast sends them all to the ground.
She lies on the ground winded, is there for only a second before someone grabs her and yanks her back up. She's unsure of which one of them even grabbed her, aware of only the hand around her arm and her feet back on the dirt before they let go.
There is nothing recognizable about the road behind them. Both cars have gone up, both buildings on either side. One of the Sentinel cars in the road has caught fire, too, and is burning away just the same.
Emmi picks herself up out of the road thirty feet back, dusty and bleeding. Someone practically trips out of the building behind her, half of them on fire. Hair alight, arm and both legs burning.
She puts a bullet in him, or maybe her. Ria can't even tell.
"We really should not be fucking standing here!" Icarus snaps, and one of them shoves her so hard in the back she almost falls again.
Right, get to the car. They really should do that.
She takes back off down the road. Someone else comes spinning out of the fire and falls to the ground, dead two seconds later. Another one follows but when they fall she watches some of the fire go out in the road amidst their frantic writhing.
Definitely not dead.
"Fuck's sake, go!" Icarus yells, and then practically rips the other gun out of Soran's hands. Emmi is nearly caught up to them, now. Soran grabs her, this time, and yanks her after him. She hears more bullets, dimly, several of them. Maybe Icarus is just a really bad shot.
For some reason that seems likely.
She rounds the next corner and nearly slams into the back of the car. Soran rips the keys out of her hand and practically dives into the front seat, jamming them into the ignition before he's even righted himself. She climbs into the backseat behind him, the ringing in her ears beginning to take over.
Emmi gets into the passenger seat a second later and nearly falls into the backseat with her momentum.
"Where?"
Icarus opens the door next to her and she doesn't even get a yelp out before he shoves her across the seat, so she grabs the other door and pulls herself across, letting him clamber in next to her, gun still in hand.
"How many was that?"
"I didn't stop to ask!" Emmi yells. "Just go!"
"At least four," Icarus says. "Two went up, we finished two others."
"There's six," Emmi insists.
"Are you sure?"
"Maybe?"
"Fuck's sake," Soran mutters, nearly crashing them into another building he turns the next corner so fast, urging them away from the fire. Six, four... there are two more out there, then. She spins in her seat and stares out the back window as they race to the edge of the town.
And then, finally, a car behind them. The lone intact one.
"Guys," she says nervously.
"Fuck me," Emmi says.
"Fuck everything," Soran says instead. "Do we have a plan for that?"
Once again everyone turns to look at her. She freezes, torn between looking at the car and putting her eyes back down. She doesn't know how to look all three of them in the eye at once.
"Don't ask me," she pleads. Or even look in this direction. There's a great chorus of swearing. Even she has to admit, it's impressive.
"It's only two," Emmi says. "We can take two. We just did."
"They were on fire, that's a big fucking difference!" Icarus shouts.
"Just keep driving."
"What does it look like I'm doing?" Soran yells at her.
"Can we like, calm down?" she asks, and they look at her again, but this time as if she's grown a second head, or perhaps multiple. There's a very eerie, icy calmness deep in the pit of her stomach. Fire really has always been easier, burns nothing at all... this is just the same. There may be no burning the other two the same way, though. They can't get that lucky twice.
Because death, in this case, is the lucky option. It's odd to think of it that way.
"Okay, no, we can do this," Emmi says. "There has to be a town just outside of the valley's boundary. As long as we beat them there..."
"We stop, they kill us, and then they kill the entire town?" Icarus asks. "What sort of plan is that?"
"Do you have a better one?"
"We need to kill them now," Soran says.
"Then what's your suggestion?" Emmi questions. "Because—"
She hears the squeal of the tires before the stopping force actually kicks in, and then she's thrown against the back of the passenger seat as Soran hits the breaks so suddenly that they go from speeding through the desert to almost stopped in a matter of seconds. There's a great chorus of complaints as everyone is thrown around before he turns to the back seat and takes the gun back from Icarus' hands, still clutching onto it.
"Your hands won't even stop shaking—"
Soran clearly doesn't listen; he cranks down the window and peers out for a second. A bullet slams into the metal exterior of the car and then another into the back windshield, which shatters on impact. She shrieks and dives down, hands over her head, only hoping that everyone else is doing the same.
"How close are you going to let them get?" Emmi shouts.
Close. Very close. Ria can hear the car now, even if she won't raise her head to see. She has nothing useful to offer anymore, no guns and no long range weapons. Her time has passed.
Soran hits the gas again. She feels it in the way she sways, still awkwardly hunched over, unable to do anything but sit there with her hands over her ears and pray to something that she doesn't even really believe in.
And she can still hear the car. It's right behind them.
Neither of them are driving very fast, though. Soran's not speeding along like he was before and neither is the car that's practically on top of them, approaching just as slowly as if out of sheer curiosity. Wondering, no doubt, what they could possibly be doing now after everything that's already happened. It could be any number of things, really. Even Ria doesn't know so much anymore.
"I might need you to take this," Soran says. He grabs the edge of the window, leans out a ways.
"Don't you dare," Icarus snaps.
Leaning out or not Soran hasn't lifted his foot off the gas, any. Emmi leans over to grab the steering wheel even though he's still got one hand on it, righting them slightly in the middle of the open field. The car behind them, beside them now, scraps against the bumper and then against across the door to her left. She's never heard such a noise outside of a television before.
There's no getting away from them now.
"I said—"
Icarus' words fall on deaf ears, drowned out the rest of the way by something cracking the side window in two - a bullet, probably. She dives forward again, this time nearly folded herself into the tiny space behind the back-seat as the cars scrape together once again. There's an entire chorus of shouting from everyone but her; it takes everything to clamp down the scream that rises in her throat and keep silent, trying to take in everything going on around her with nothing but her ears for help, the shift of the air around her.
There's another shout - this one is more frantic, and there's another noise that's distinctly not any of the other three people in the car, this she knows.
Icarus finally jostles her enough that she looks up, seeing nothing but a blur of him as he dives forward into the front seat to latch onto Soran's legs, who appears, to her knowledge, to be hanging half out of the window of a speeding vehicle.
Well, that certainly explains the noise.
The cars are so close together that he's launched himself clear to the other car, holding onto the edge of the open window with one hand and the person in the passenger seat with the other, decidedly not Carnelia. The only other woman left, the dark-haired one who appears to only have one hand?
She nearly considers folding herself back onto the floor.
Everyone else is practically in the driver's seat though, or at least half of them. Soran's halfway out, Icarus is keeping him from plunging out entirely, Emmi's trying to keep them going in a semi-straight line with only one hand.
Soran's pulling at her, though, as much as he can. She doesn't even know how he's still holding on.
There's some credit due for that, somewhere.
"Hold onto him!" Emmi yells, and Ria only has time to grab onto something herself before Emmi turns the wheel all the way to the right - the cars split apart and finally there's silence for a mere second as the screeching stops, only for the screaming to pick back up as the momentum and Soran's grip on her arm pulls the other woman clear from the window.
There's one long, awful second in which she drops from the window and Ria almost thinks Soran's still going to hold on. Keep her from falling.
She's not sure why, because he doesn't.
Ria doesn't see her fall, doesn't see Soran let go of her. She feels it, though, the awkward bump and jerk of the car as the wheels catch her.
As they go over her.
The silence as it falls, for once, isn't comforting to her in the slightest.
"Fucking get him back in here, would you?" Emmi orders. Another bullet - it just misses him. Ria leans forward if only to observe because she doesn't feel like she's doing much of anything else, watching with painstaking slowness as Icarus pulls Soran back into the car inch by inch until he's no longer dangling out by his ankles. He eventually flops back into the driver's seat half on top of everybody else, forcing Icarus back beside her.
"Is she dead?" he manages. Emmi wrenches the car forward again and he reaches back up for the wheel. Ria spins in her seat to take a long look out the back window at the shape in the dirt some ways away already, getting smaller and smaller by the second.
It's not moving. And there's still the more pressing matter of the car that's turned to follow them regardless, slowly gaining ground once again.
"Anyone got a plan for the big bad?" Icarus asks alongside her, staring out at the motionless shape in the distance the same way she is. Blank-faced, a nervous swallow here and there.
"There aren't seat-belts in here, are there?" Emmi questions. She shares a look with Soran, and something passes between the two of them, some fucked-up nonsensical thing that only people with particularly ravaged brains could come up with. Icarus all but shoves his way in-between them and even he seems to understand something.
"What?" she asks. Emmi looks back at the approaching car too, eyebrows knitted together.
"Those lights on the horizon are getting closer," Soran observes. "If we're gonna get her we need to do it before then."
She can see them too. Little flickers like fairy lights, not so far away anymore. They're past the border of the valley and suddenly hope exists, a possible place of safety.
They can't very well lead Carnelia Trevall into the middle of that.
"So what are we doing?" she asks, even though everyone already seems to know besides her. They're still speeding along; the car behind them is gaining inch after inch. She may not be able to shoot and drive at the same time but she's getting awfully close. Enough to chance it.
Ria can't tear her eyes away from the car, from the fading lines of the town they left behind, the silhouette of the leftover fire casting an orange glow into the sky.
"There are train tracks to our left," Emmi points out, although she hardly hears her. "The ground slopes down before. Ditch?"
"Probably," Soran mutters. "If we all die, I'm sorry. It was fun while it lasted."
"Was it?" Icarus asks.
"Not really."
Ria can feel the panic now, a handhold around her throat that's keeping her from breathing properly. Something's about to happen, something awful in the garish glow from both of their headlights.
Except... except there's a third too.
A little bit further. away Not the double glow from a car like this one or the one behind them. One single point of light that almost seems to grow bigger, as if it's coming after them as well.
The venom wouldn't produce hallucinations; that would be her only excuse for what she's seeing, even if it was still raging through her system.
Sabre's dead. She saw it happen. Jay's dead. She did that with her own two hands.
"Emmi," she says, maybe too quiet, because she gets no response for her troubles. Maybe Emmi wouldn't know either, wouldn't have an explanation for the bike that seems to be tailing them as if it's come to life itself, working when nothing else is.
It's there. Someone's there.
"Fuck my life," Soran says, which is more appropriate than sorry ever would be as he slams on the breaks, just as the ground starts to dip underneath them.
In a few split seconds, longer than they possible could be, the car goes from a breakneck speed to a second from stopped. Ria slams into the back of the seat in front of her and she bounces off it like she was thrown by something much stronger than herself. Glass cracks. Shatters. She can barely right herself or even lift up her neck to see as she goes flying about.
And so she doesn't, not in time for the impact.
The other car collides with them, right in the back. The sensation of flying is a very odd one.
She doesn't get to feel the even worse one of them slipping over the edge.
...
From far away the collision almost looks fake.
The cars together disappear from view as they slide down the hill, however deep or not it may be.
As the noise fades away, the evidence that it ever happened, it suddenly seems much more real.
There's no telling what about the disappearance makes it that much more authentic; the sudden realization, maybe, of what just happened as it hits harder than even the two cars in the first place. Of the possible death and bloodshed, worse than what they already left behind.
What they left behind was pretty terrible to begin with, as he quickly discovered. The fire and ash, the unrecognizable ruin of whatever they had done.
Whatever they were still doing, maybe, although this looked an awful lot like an ending.
It was awful, certainly, to be grateful for that. But as he paused at the top of the ridge looking down into the ditch, letting the bike roll to a stop before he got too far to come back, it reversed just enough to matter. There was still just enough awful creaking from the two ruined vehicles that things seemed just this side of too dangerous.
Really though, there's nothing he can consider too dangerous anymore. Not everything he's done, everything he's been through.
And once the vehicles finally settle into their resting place, it seems, there's still the littlest bit of movement. Life where there should be none.
He hadn't allowed himself to hope until now. Maybe that had something to do with the plastic he was certain was melted into the bottom of his feet, shoeless since the fire took them both. When something as ridiculous as that happened, nothing seemed so certain. It was all he could taste in the back of his lungs, the acrid tang of the fire and God knows what else he had breathed in during it, the charred scent of bodies and drooping skin.
He swallows as if to rid the taste before he gets off the bike and starts inching his way into the ditch, but it doesn't go away. It never has.
It never will, he assumes. Especially now that he may actually have a chance at life.
There definitely is movement, though. He grabs the back of one of the vehicles as he slides the rest of the way down, finding a spot of semi-flat ground that's not entirely covered in debris, not an easy task with his already destroyed feet.
He sees the first hint of a person crawling and dragging themselves from amidst the rubble and he comes close as ever to not properly breathing, watching them emerge inch by painful inch from the worst of the collapsed car. He's not even sure what it is that he's expecting, really, other than the worse.
It's not the worst if they're alive, is his thinking. Even if it's just one person...
There's something in his gut that already knows, though, that knew it all along even if he didn't want to believe it. It hurt too much to believe something that may not have been true all along.
His feet stay firmly planted, silent save for the occasional creak his hand pushing along the metal is causing. Predictably, awkwardly, his eyes are watering.
Finally she pulls herself free, covered in a healthy slick of blood, grabbing at every small indentation in the ground to wriggle herself into something that resembles a sitting position. He watches her reach up to pluck out a piece of glass embedded in her brow, fingers trembling.
"You shouldn't," he manages, and her body leans a bit in his direction, shifting until she looks up at him, eyes narrowed into confused slits. Her hand pauses above her brow, motionless.
She doesn't move other than that, either, blinking slowly a few times.
"Tarquin?" Ria asks, voice dreadfully quiet. "Am I dead?"
He's not so sure about that himself, really, both for her benefit and also his own.
"Surprise," he says instead, which feels simultaneously like the worst thing he could have ever said and also the only appropriate one. He doesn't move as she pulls herself up using the edge of the car; feels like he should, but he can't. Maybe there's not a lot of good he can do here after saving her life in the first place.
"Where is she?" Ria wonders. She's turned away from him again, still hunched over and clutching to her side. "Is she—"
"Who?"
"Carnelia."
"Are you telling me you killed Carnelia Trevall?"
"Are you telling me you killed all of those people and survived?" she asks, voice edging into hysteria. She takes a few unsteady paces further into the ditch, where it evens out at the bottom, and starts hobbling her way to the opposite car.
She sounds even more like she's about to cry than he did just a minute ago.
"Ria, hold on," he instructs, hurrying after her, sort of. It's really hard. There's definitely glass in the bottom of his feet, now, but he's still not in the shape she is. He found the abandoned bike and got here, after all. She can hardly walk and it's not hard to see why.
She all but collapses against the other car before he gets to her and he only just manages to catch her from going any further, gripping at her arm to keep her standing. Ria makes a sound not all that far away from a sob, worse because of the pain creeping in at the edge.
"Make sure she's dead," she begs. "Please—"
He crouches down at her feet, edging his way as close to the caved in front window as he can. The car is effectively upside down, at this point. The one Ria crawled out of is no better, the front end of it completely crushed in like a soda can someone left in the street.
It's so dark that he struggles to see much of anything, really. The ceiling has caved in a ways too, and he can see only the sliver of a twisted human being, motionless. An arm crushed under the remains of the dashboard, paper white.
"Was she the only one in here?"
"Soran got the other girl out," she manages, but he can hardly hear her with how far he's stuck his head inside the car, trying to see any sign of life. It's not really a proper answer, but she'd tell him if there was something endangering him.
Just Carnelia Trevall, no big deal.
What appears to be a significantly dead Carnelia Trevall, really.
He reaches out for the arm, has to pry the hand and part of the forearm out to feel along it for a pulse. He can't even feel a fully intact bone, let alone any sign of a heartbeat. He wraps his hand around the wrist, even shakes it a bit like something will flare to life.
"Aren't you supposed to be dead?" someone asks, and he has the misfortune to hit his head on the edge of the cracked window-frame on his way back out, Ria's hand tightening painfully on his shoulder. He hadn't even noticed it there.
The look on Emmi's face can only be described as vaguely disgruntled, as if someone just woke her up five minutes shy of her morning alarm. There's a garish, bright trail of blood that stops at her nose and spreads out in several more lines.
Much to his alarm, she spits out what looks like a section of one of her own teeth into the dirt.
It seems a little ironic, coming from her.
"Probably," he agrees. "But she is."
Emmi considers that, staring at him for a few heartbeats longer before she sits down on the ground with a thud and then flops onto her back.
"Emmi," Ria says, a tinge of worry to her tone.
"I'm good," she insists, waving her arm out in a general direction that only speaks right. "Icarus is gonna need some help. Like a two-armed type of help."
"Where's Soran?"
"That's why he needs help."
He hauls himself back to his feet; they definitely hurt worse than before, which says a whole hell of a lot. Ria's certainly not going to be any help right now though, and Emmi's laying there like she plans on doing it for the next century. His feet are on fire, but he can walk. He's learned that through experience.
"Stay here," he instructs, and Ria's hand slips off his shoulder as he turns to go, following the clear trail that Emmi must have kicked through the worst of the glass and metal to make her way over here. The ditch only goes a few more feet down before it curves to the left, where he rounds the car and loses sight of the two girls.
He knew Icarus without really knowing him so it's not a strange sight to see him turn and look Tarquin in the eye, going from perpetually dead-inside to alarmed and looking as if he's about to bludgeon him with... nothing at all, really, in a few seconds flat. He's teetering on only one foot; the foot he's standing on is being leaned on by Soran, who looks like he'd be flat on the ground without anything to keep him up.
"I'm done," Icarus says flatly. "Like, good-fucking-night moon, or whatever. I'm done."
Okay, Tarquin can understand that. He felt that in a lot in the long hours it took him to find another exit out of the mines after the one behind him had collapsed from the force of the explosion. The urge to give in and be done was a strong one.
Soran looks up and sort of through him, as if he's not standing there at all, and then chokes up a mouthful of blood all over the ground.
That's nice.
"Fuck," Icarus says, without any feeling. He leans down, carefully, and clamps down on his own lip when he puts weight on his clearly injured foot, trying to pull Soran up, somehow, when he's hardly standing himself.
"Okay, maybe we shouldn't move him," he cautions. "If he's injured internally, or something—"
"Fucking if," Icarus spits. "He went out the fucking windshield, I'm pretty sure it's a definite yes."
It looks like the windshield won, if Tarquin's being honest with himself. He doesn't say that aloud.
They have to move him, though. What else are they going to do? There's a town or something not far from here, the prospect of help, so what's he to do? Take the person in the best shape and get help on the bike when he can hardly feel his own feet?
Ria or Emmi would go with him. Not Icarus, he doesn't think, who looks about as close to crying as Ria did and who has chosen to ignore all advice Tarquin's offered since he showed up. He hovers by their side when Icarus resumes his quest to get them both standing up and ends up grabbing onto both of them when they nearly topple over.
He'd be convinced Soran was a corpse on it's feet if he wasn't blinking slowly every few seconds. Beyond that it's more than slightly concerning.
He kicks away a bigger path for the three of them even though Icarus is essentially dragging Soran along, half-hopping himself. Icarus looks like he's about to cut his hand off every time he so much as extends it when one of them wobbles but he keeps doing it only for the fact that if one of them goes down again he's not so certain they'll get back up.
Up ahead there's a light cutting down the path, and Icarus grabs his arm right where the flesh is charred and peeling away from the mine fire a second before he hears an odd noise from above, one that he can't associate with anything he knows.
"That light isn't—"
"From one of us?" he finishes. For the first time Soran makes a noise, but he can't tell what it's supposed to mean. If it even means anything.
"If that's another Sentinel I will absolutely let them kill us all," Icarus informs them, and Tarquin's about ready to agree when he sees the silhouette at the top of the hill. It's not a familiar face, nothing he could hope for. Nothing he envisioned when he was lost in the never-ending maze below the mountains, nothing but fire and corpses at his back.
It's reminiscent of a Peacekeeper uniform, older and more tattered, more muted in color. Otherwise just a tall, shapeless form rendered almost black from the lights of the new car behind them, covered in dust from the desert as if it belongs here, or has been here all along.
Maybe it has.
He gets one last good look at the hopeful lights in the distance, a place this person might have came from.
Something hits him in the neck, a single pinprick that sets the nerves there alight. Besides him Icarus makes a vaguely alarmed noise and nothing else. Up the ditch there's no sign of Ria, no sign of Emmi.
He hits the ground with no recollection of falling in the first place. He reaches up, fingers closing around something sticking out of his neck, and wrenches it out. A little glass vial, something that would feel so easily breakable in the tight grasp of his fist if he could even move.
And a needle, at the end of it. For a second he's transported right back to the hovercraft, the feeling of that little jab into his ankle and then an inky blackness spreading over his eyes.
It's that same feeling now.
He can't move. He only feels the last two arrows strung over his back slip out of the sheath and disappear. He's never getting those back.
He had thought for one hopeful second that he might not need them.
He's not so sure anymore.
It's a miracle he goes under at all, with how fast his heart is racing away.
But he does.
There's only one thing I like more than the number four, and that's the number five. And nine but like, technicalities.
Yeah yeah yeah I'll get on with the apologies now? You know, for lying about who was dead once again and also saying only one person was going to win this whole time, whatever that meant. To be fair the several years ago original idea did only have one (read: two) living but I'm dumb as hell and also wildly insatiable so here we are.
Yeah. Sorry though. I'll just take my 17 survivors over 4 fics and vacate until next Saturday.
Until next time.