The feel of hands around her ankle lingered even after Rain was pulled to safety. At the top of the silver tube, Mist and Walter yanked her up out of the slide. Her hand was aching and cut from the rope, but she didn’t care. If it meant leaving one hand behind, she would’ve done anything to get out of that room.
“The Mothers were grabbing me,” Rain said. Her breathing was labored, her heart pounding in her chest. “I don’t know how they got in there. We looked everywhere for a way to get out.”
“Where’s Adam?” Walter asked, resting his hand on her shoulder as Rain bent over and tried to catch her breath.
Tears filled her eyes again as Rain said, “I don’t know. They had to have taken him.” She stood up, wiping at her eyes.
Mother Jaguar had the needle in her hand and was coming at Adam, ready to inject that chemical into his thigh. Normally, it would go in their buttocks, but he was sitting on his, and she wasn’t going to unstrap him for that. Flashes of images filled his mind. Bruises. Pain from the needle. The numbness that followed. The hard-on he wouldn’t be able to control. All of those women mounting him like he was an animal or a prop. Not a person but an inanimate object that they could use however they liked. As Jaguar got closer to him, he could see her maniacal smile. She looked so pleased with herself that she could inflict one more round of torture on a man before the Mothers were blasted into oblivion. She had to know at this point that they couldn’t win, didn’t she? They were outnumbered, and the Quebecians and their allies had far superior weapons and more of them. So, why do one more sadistic act before she
Following Walt down the hallway, Rain tried to keep her heart from hammering so loudly that she couldn’t hear anything else. They needed to find Lightning and get her to a computer that was hooked up to the rest of the Mother’s databases to see if they could possibly get behind the firewall that protected the records. If anyone could do it, it was Lightning, the brains behind this entire rebellion. If she was even still alive. “The quickest way to get downstairs is going to be going back toward the front of the building, away from all of the action,” Walt said as they rushed back the way they’d come. The further down the hallway they traveled, the more distant the sound of gunfire sounded. Rain just hoped it stayed that way. “Won’t the Mothers be watching us on camera and know what we’re up to?” Adam asked as they ran along through the corridor so close toget
“Stand back,” Mist told them, her voice calm and collected. Rain wasn’t sure what her friend had in mind, but she had to trust her. Along with Walt and Adam, Rain retreated away from the door, all three of them going back further into the stairwell they’d just exited. Rain couldn’t quite see what Mist was doing, but a few moments after she commanded them to get out of the way, she came running at them, full speed. Walt grabbed her in his arms and pulled her away as a ball of fire came shooting across the opening from the door to where the four friends stood huddled on the stairs. They weren’t quite far enough away to avoid the synge of the explosion. Their uniforms were somewhat fireproof, but not entirely. Rain lifted her arm to cover her face as the sound of a bomb going off shook the floor and sent piece
The struggle to get up the stairs was real. The women were so unbelievably weak, their legs shaking, it took forever for most of them to even lift their legs high enough to climb the stairs. The idea that they should all just pick up a girl and carry her up the stairs, coming back for a second entered Rain’s mind, but they couldn’t carry them all the way outside, so it seemed pointless to take them up the stairs when they’d still have to manage to get out of the building. At this rate, the Mothers would be able to bring troops from another town and get them there in time before these poor ladies made it up the stairs. As she was helping them up the stairs, the girl on Rain’s left was talking. Rain sort of wished she wouldn’t. Nothing she was saying was pleasant, and she truly needed to save her breath, but she was telling her what had transpired, and Rain had
“I’m okay!” Walt was shouting as Mist began to sputter, no coherent words coming out of her mouth as she watched the blood pouring out of his leg. “It’s not as bad as it looks,” Walt insisted.“Let me be the judge of that,” Rain insisted, pulling her healing wand out of the packet on her belt where she’d stashed it after she’d used it last time.“I’m fine, really,” Walt said. “We need to get these girls out of here before the Mothers come back.”“Walt! Let Rain use that wand on you!” Mist insisted.Walt was already pulling a piece of cloth from his own belt and winding it around his leg, tying it off like that was going to stop the blood loss. “It just nicked me th
Adam flew down the hallways as quickly as he could go, trying not to think about what might happen to Rain and Lightning while he was gone. He had to let the men out of the storage closet and get them outside. Getting them out of the closet would be easy. Getting them out of the building would be harder, especially if the Military Mothers had caught on already that tactics had been changed, and rather than trying to find the records room, at least part of the Quebecian forces were trying to circumvent it.Seeing the storage room up ahead, Adam sped up and then skidded to a stop in front of the door. He knew that the door was already unlocked, so all he had to do was throw the latch, which couldn’t be accessed from the inside.He knew that the men on the other side would have no idea who was opening the door, and they wouldn’t be able to hear h
The Military Mothers’ boots hit the ground almost in tandem, which told Rain what formation they were in. Even before she rounded the corner where she could see them, she had a vision of exactly where each of them was standing.She took a deep breath and flung herself out into the open where the women were coming at her as fast as they could run. Rain aimed and pulled her trigger four times, hitting all four of them before any of them could fire a first shot at her.The first two were hit squarely in the head, one of them in the forehead, the other in her nose. The second two were a little shorter than Rain had anticipated, and she grazed one of them in the helmet before she could adjust and shot the last one in the cheek. She went flying backward, screaming, blood spurting through her hands.The
Adam led the way around the outside of the building, the naked, exhausted men running behind him as quickly as they could. He was the only one with clothes; he was the only one with a weapon.Memories of the Mothers shooting down at them earlier from one of the apartment buildings made him leery to take them out in the open, but it was the only way they were going to be able to get to the camp. He didn’t see any Mothers in the buildings when he stuck his head out around the corner. Nor did he see anyone wearing his own colored uniform. An occasional popping sound made its way out from inside the building, but other than that there was only the chirping of birds in the trees in the distance and the buzz of insects.“All right! Keep your heads down. We’re going to that next building over there, got it?” Adam said, turning to face the