Page 43 of Deathless
She looked at me and something in her face crumpled again, but she nodded.
I pushed to my feet. Beni moved through the wounded with a couple of the others. I counted heads as I walked. Three dead, eight of them hurt badly enough to need attention, and the rest stood or sat, shell-shocked but mobile.
All of them looked at me.
Valentina sat with her back against a boulder, face like stone. One of the kids cried on someone's shoulder. Beni had a bloodstain spreading across his shirt that he ignored.
I stopped in the middle of the gully and forty pairs of eyes tracked me like I had answers.
Was it worth it?
Mierda. I didn't know. I'd made a choice. It was done. I had to live with it.
"We bury our dead," I said. "Then we get moving. We're not safe here."
"And the girl?" Valentina asked.
"I'm getting her back."
"How?"
I looked at her, at all of them, at the bodies in the dirt, the blood drying black on the rocks, the mountains beyond where Jasper still fought.
"I don't know yet," I said. "But I made her a promise."
Nobody argued. I'd already decided, and that was that.
Beni started organizing people to move the bodies. My mother stayed with Abuela. The sun kept climbing and turning everything orange and gold, like the world gave a shit that we'd just lost people.
I needed to get everyone moving. The rendezvous point was hours away through the mountains. Jasper was supposed to meet us there if he made it out, if he was still alive.
Last night he'd said he’d stay. I'd said after this, after tomorrow, whatever happens, and he'd looked at me like I'd offered him something he'd stopped believing existed. Now Ihad to stand in front of that man and tell him Eight was in Patroklos's hands because I'd made a call.
I turned away from the tunnel entrance and started down the gully.
The tunnel mouth spatme out into gray dawn light, and I went down on one knee, ribs on fire, lungs trying to remember how breathing worked. I dropped the lamp, and the glass shattered.
The smell of gunpowder and blood hit first, thick enough that I tasted copper on the back of my tongue.
A lot of blood covered these rocks.
Shell casings littered the gully floor. Bullet holes chewed through boulders that should have provided cover but hadn't. Drag marks scored the earth where someone had hauled bodies clear, boot prints heading south in a ragged column.
Diego's people had fought here. They'd gathered their dead and kept moving.
I scanned the ground for Eight's prints. Small boots, light tread, the pattern I'd memorized from every doorway she'd stood in for a year. I covered the gully twice and found nothing.
Lorenzo stumbled out of the tunnel behind me and bent over with his hands on his knees. Rhadamanthys limped out afterhim, favoring the leg Eight had opened, and Alonzo came last with his rifle still up.
"Merda," Lorenzo said to the ground.
The ridgeline told the story. Men had come down from the north in formation, set up a crossfire from the high ground, engaged, and pulled back. They'd had every advantage, but they'd gotten what they wanted and left. The boot prints heading south were fresh, ragged but organized. Someone had been giving orders. That meant Diego might still be breathing.
I started walking.
Lorenzo caught up to me. "Jasper. Slow down."
I kept walking.
