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“Felicia?”

I crawled over to her. She’d drawn as well, on Orrin and Dale. We’d been of the same mind, in the end. It would have been easy for her to gun me down.

She lay on her back, holding her throat, frothy blood pouring out of her mouth with each cough and attempted breath.

“Felicia . . .”

She grabbed my arm tight, squeezing hard, her eyes looking past me as she groaned through bubbles of blood, then stopped.

“Felicia.”

“Sir?” The schoolteacher looked around the edge of the vault door, his eyes wide.

“Stay here. For now, just stay here,” I told him. “I have to arrange how to get you out of here safely.”

I limped toward the elevator, tears in my eyes.

IN THE back of the Pelican, my body armor stained with Felicia’s blood, I unsteadily held my sidearm at the side of Eric’s face.

“You remember when the bomb went off in the club?” I asked him.

He turned to look directly at the gun and me. “Every day since I woke up.”

“I remember being trapped in the dark, chest too constricted to scream, panting for what air I could get. And I remember it was an ODST who pulled me out. That moment, I don’t think I could ever forget that.”

“That why you joined?”

“Yeah.” I nodded. “Now I’m on the other side, only I’m there to steal the wallet off the guy in the rubble and leave them to die.”

“We couldn’t have known there would be children,” Eric said.

“We have to do something.”

Eric sighed. “Gage, there’s nothing we can do. Look, we can try and fit a few of them where we can, but let’s not throw away our futures, what Felicia worked for.”

The speaker in the cockpit crackled. The attack was withdrawing. Not just a single artifact, but several artifacts had been stolen from the Covenant dig site. ODSTs were in full retreat with hundreds of Grunts in full pursuit.

“They’re able to track the artifacts somehow!” a hysterical private reported. “We split up into several groups, and all the Covenant are coming after just us!”

No battle plan survived contact with the enemy.

Eric shook his head. “There’s not much we can do now. We just poked the Covenant nest and it sounds like they’re swarming.”

Our fellow ODSTs were calling for the Pelicans to get them the hell out of the hot zone.

I waved the sidearm at Eric. “Get out.”

“What?”

“Get out. I don’t want to shoot you. But I know how to help them. So get the hell out.”

“Do you know who you’re dealing with? You know me. But Teller, Amey, Charleston? They’re old school CMA. Watts loyalists. And they’ve done it all. We’re not crossing them. I’m not getting the hell off my own ship,” Eric gritted. I smacked him in the head with the pistol butt three times to knock him out, then dragged him to the back of the Pelican and rolled him off into the street.

Charleston and Amey were manning the mounted machine guns, but hadn’t looked over and down into the street.

It had been another lifetime ago that I watched Allison Stark fly a Hornet through the night, but I remembered the controls she’d shown me and seen it done a hundred times since.

Standardized.

I’d stood in the back of the Pelican cockpits enough, too.

That didn’t mean what I was going to try next would work.

I switched to an encrypted channel that the other pilots weren’t monitoring and patched into the cruiser in orbit. “Chares, we have what we came for, but we need more transport. This is urgent. We need Pelican backup, right away. Three Pelicans took incoming fire and are down, repeat down. Scramble immediately.”

I tried to remember what was what. Stick, collective throttle . . . all the buttons and switches in front of me.

But a Pelican was enough like a second home that I got it started.

Amey and Charleston would no doubt be wondering what was happening as the Pelican’s engines gunned to life. The craft lurched, clawing for air, pregnant with gold in the green-gray ammunition chests.

I scraped along a building, knocking down balconies and brickwork as I struggled to get the Pelican higher.

I was tense, waiting for the mounted machine guns to open up on me, but they never did.