And another.

And another.

All around her, the road was crumbling.

Kate sprinted for cover, drawing her baton as the ground shuddered and split under her boots. She got her back to a wall just in time to see another section of the street collapse, swallowing two more soldiers.

The blasts were coming from the tunnels below.

“Get off the ground!” she called, her voice lost in the fray before she remembered the comm hooked to her vest. She punched the button and shouted into the mic.

A few of the soldiers straightened, but too many were still weaving through the wreckage, trying to help the wounded. Idiots.

The night was filling with smoke and dust and debris, and Kate hauled herself a few rungs up a fire escape and squinted through the haze, searching for August. Instead she saw a shock of silver hair moving through the fray. Soro.

A massive blast rocked the night and the Sunai staggered, covering their ears, as the ground nearby split, cracks racing toward them along the street. Soro couldn’t see them, but Kate could.

She called out to the Sunai, and Soro’s head shot up, eyes narrowing.

“Move!” shouted Kate, an instant before the road beneath the Sunai gave way. Soro moved just in time, lunging out of the path.

Kate climbed another rung, scanning the chaos. She saw August down the block, covered in dust and holding up a wounded FTF.

At the same moment, he looked up and saw her, raising a hand just before the ground exploded at his feet.

The world went white.

One second August was standing on the street and the next, he was engulfed—he couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, couldn’t feel anything but force of the explosion.

Is this what it feels like, he wondered, to be unmade?

But then he hit the ground.

He landed hard, the fall knocking the air from his lungs. His head rang from the blast, his hearing swallowed by the high white noise.

The world was dark around him, but at least the darkness seemed to be a shallow thing, somewhere in front of his eyes, instead of behind them. High overhead there was a hole and, beyond that, the smoky night, the far-off haze of headlights. Judging by the vaulted ceiling, the long echo, and the metal bars beneath his back, he’d landed in a subway tunnel.

The wounded FTF lay nearby, his body twisted unnaturally atop the rubble. When August tried to move, he realized he might not be hurt or broken, but he was stuck, one leg pinned beneath concrete and rebar.

Slowly, the tinny ringing in his ears subsided, and he could make out a different kind of noise. The steady rush of water.

His chest tightened in panic but the sound wasn’t getting any closer. The subway—it was built over a river. When he shifted, bits of rubble tumbled down through the gaps in the floor and dropped the long way to the water below.

August threw all his weight into freeing himself from the debris, but none of it yielded.

The Corsai in the shadows snickered.

sunaisunaistucksunai

August looked around for something, anything, to use as a lever, and as he scanned the tunnel, two burning red dots, like the ends of cigarettes, danced in the dark.

“Alice.”

“Hello, August.”

There was something in her hand. A remote.

She nudged an object with her foot and it rolled toward him, stopping against a chunk of concrete by his knee. It looked like a lopsided ball, a lumpy package all tied up with tape.

It took him too long to realize what it was.

Alice perched on the farthest piece of rubble and turned the detonator between her fingers. “How long can Sunai hold their breath?”

“August!” Kate’s voice echoed through the tunnel.

She was above him, crouched at the edge of the hole, tying a cable to a piece of rebar.

No, thought August. Run.

But it was too late.

Alice looked up.

Her red eyes flared wide, and Kate stared back in shock, and August tried to say something—anything—just as the Malchai hit the remote.

The blast went off, and the ground gave way, and he was falling again, still tangled up in the concrete and steel and taking half the subway floor down with him.

And this time, the ground didn’t stop his fall.

How long can Sunai hold their breath?

He hit the surface of the water and sank like a stone.

Kate stared down at the Malchai and for a strange, disorienting instant she didn’t—couldn’t—grasp what she was seeing. It was like a reflection, distorted by smoke and shadow. And then she understood.

She was staring at a ghost, a shade, a monster made in her own image.

And it looked up at her and smiled just before the blast.

The explosion rocked the tunnel, and Kate nearly lost her balance as August crashed into the river.

“Soro!” she called out, grabbing the cable and leaping into the dark. The cord burned her palms as she descended too fast and hit the ground hard, rolling up with an HUV in one hand and the gun in the other.

The shadows hissed around her, rebuffed by the beam of light and the metal tracery on her gear.

A second later Soro landed in a graceful crouch several feet away, no rope, nothing but six feet of long limbs and the inability to break on impact.

All Kate said was “August,” but Soro was already moving, fastening a cable to their belt as they dove through the jagged hole in the subway floor and into the shadowed water below.