Bound to Ashes [The Altered Sequence: Book 1]

16 • The Unfinished Mission

[Dev]

Looks like he was quicker than we thought.

The Sentinels did a number on him. Red, angry lines lie across his bare arms and sliced through his undershirt, as if he ran through a forest of blades. But his expression betrays no fear or doubt. Only anger.

Alessandra seethes. "You have five seconds to get the hell out of here or I swear to god I'll do what I tried to do back home."

"You'll try," he spits, gripping the machinery in his hands tighter. He holds it like a rifle, but what is it...?

"Why'd you follow us?" Peregrine says. "Why couldn't you just let it go?!"

I'm ready for an explanation, but I don't think he'll give us one judging by the furrowed look he's giving us. "I don't have time for this," he says. He lifts the machine up and points it not at us, but at the scaffolding. And then it makes sense.

"Get back!"

Rifles fire behind me. My stomach drops from the grating, keening sound exploding from the red mechanism. The laser manages to cut through half the scaffolding floor, but Heydrich is punched back by something, probably the shot... but he's still on his feet. The Sentinel laser sputters and groans into darkness. More shots. I almost reach for the rifle I no longer have, so I slide to the edge closest to the pillar. Heydrich isn't scared. He just got shot once, twice, five times with the rifles from the humans. One by one I hear empty clicks in response. They ran out of ammo, what little was left. Heydrich stands. You're kidding... he slumps over like a ragdoll, still holding the machine in one hand, and he starts to laugh. Slowly at first, then growing in magnitude, until he throws his head back and laughs at the darkness above us.

That laugh.

I've heard it before.

Before....

Before we're all killed, we have to get out, push through the chain link fence and push past everyone else, just get out, get out. It doesn't matter who you have to trample to get there just move. We all grew up in the labs— our life consists of orders, shuffling around one building to the next, we don't know anything but that, and we were never trained to know how to deal with this. I get shoved aside. Everyone else is so much bigger than me. I'm just a kid. All the other kids are dead. Across the yard a guard is shooting one in the face once, twice, too many times. Killed by guards, killed by each other. Killed by him. The one standing on the sentry tower, the one holding the guard helm, just watching us run and panic and kill each other like animals. I see his eyes from here, boring through me, willing me to run. Someone screams behind me— I turn and see them fall into the dust, blood mingling with the yellow dirt and turning into mud from the writhing and squirming, the clawing to get the bullet out of their gut— I dodge, hide behind a burning storage unit, but above everything else I hear a laugh. A high-pitched, manic laugh. Our death trap is his achievement. His entertainment.

It's the same exact laugh.

He started the revolt. He's the one that put us in danger. We would have died anyway thanks to Caduceus, but not like that... not by desperation and fear by our own kind... and him just laughing....

I'm across the tear in the scaffolding before I know how. Someone screams my name, but my hands are around his throat. He's strong— almost flings me off, his pounding limbs threatening to break mine, bruises doubtlessly forming under my grey skin. Press harder, close his windpipe. For all the shit he put us through, murdering our friends, trying to starve us out in the desert, for no good reason—

Jagged metal presses against my stomach. I bring my knee up to jar it loose and it fires next to my head— that grating sound threatening to deafen me. I slam my hand into it and pin it to the ground on our left, it fires into the pillar and leaves an oozing red hole. Screeching metal on metal accompanies it and I swing around— the scaffolding is tipping, but not the side Heydrich and I are on. It's the one with the others on it.