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I woke up tasting copper and dirt.
My face was pressed into mud that stank like diesel and burned weeds. Something metal groaned nearby. Hydraulics, maybe, or what was left of the cargo bay folding in on itself. I pushed up on my elbows and spit blood.
The Horizon went down three klicks west. I could see the smoke column from here, black and greasy against the gray sky. My chute had dragged me into a drainage ditch. Lucky. If I'd hit open ground, Red Hammer patrols would've scooped me up before I could blink.
I checked my sidearm. Still there. Checked my ribs. Sore, not broken. Checked the cargo tracker on my wrist. Dead.
That's when I heard the moaning.
Two hundred meters east, tucked against a burned-out barn, I counted bodies. Not corpses. Bodies that were still moving. Twelve, maybe thirteen. Some sitting, some on their backs. One kid—couldn't have been older than eighteen—was limping between them, pressing his jacket against someone's leg.
I should've walked the other way.
I didn't.
The kid saw me coming and straightened up fast. He had brown skin, shaggy dark hair, and eyes that looked about ten years older than the rest of him. Blood streaked his jaw. Not his blood.
"You were on the bird," he said. Not a question.
"Yeah."
"You got us out. You threw me a chute."
I didn't remember his face. I remembered throwing nylon at anything that moved and hoping some of it opened.
"Who else made it?"
He gestured at the barn. "Twelve of us. Three are bad. Real bad."
I looked past him. Most of the survivors were sitting now, watching me like I had answers. A couple were kids—fifteen, sixteen. A woman with gray hair and a gash across her forehead. An older man holding his shoulder at the wrong angle. And in the shadow of the barn, someone flat on their back with their shirt soaked red.
"We need to move," I said. "Red Hammer's going to sweep this grid. If we're still here in an hour, we're dead."
The kid swallowed. "They can't walk. Not all of them."
"Then we carry them."
"Carry?" His voice cracked. "We don't even have—"
"Find something. Doors, tarps, I don't care. We move now or we don't move at all."
He stared at me like I'd just told him to build a rocket. Then he nodded and jogged back toward the barn.
I scanned the tree line. No movement yet. But that smoke column was a beacon. Every warlord crew within fifty klicks would converge on the wreck, looking for salvage. Looking for us.
A woman's voice cut through the low murmur of pain behind me.
"If you're planning to drag them, they'll bleed out before you make two klicks."
I turned.
She was kneeling beside the worst case—the one with the soaked shirt. Her hands were red to the wrists. She had short black hair, olive skin, and the kind of tired eyes that came from seeing too many people die.
"You a medic?" I asked.
"Close enough." She didn't look up. Her fingers worked fast, tying off something I couldn't see. "Leah Santos. I was riding in the cargo bay when we got hit."
"Evie Cross."
"I know. You're the one who kept the bay door open." She glanced at me, just for a second. "Stupid. Brave. Maybe both."
I crouched beside her. The man on the ground was maybe forty, pale as chalk, breathing in short gasps. Shrapnel had opened his side. I could see ribs.
"Can you stabilize him?"
Leah pressed a wad of cloth against the wound and held it there. Her jaw was tight. "Not here. Not with this. He needs a sterile room, sutures, antibiotics, and about four units of blood. I've got a trauma kit and dirty hands."
"So what do we do?"
She looked at me then. Really looked. Her eyes were dark brown, almost black, and they didn't flinch.
"You walk away, he dies. You stay, he still might die. But if you try to move him without stopping the bleeding first, he's dead in ten minutes."
I heard the kid—Cole, I'd learn his name later—shouting orders behind me. He was pulling a sheet of corrugated metal off the barn wall. Someone else was ripping up jackets for ties.
"How long do you need?" I asked.
Leah pressed harder. Blood seeped between her fingers. "Twenty minutes. Maybe thirty."
"We don't have thirty."
"Then tell me what you want me to do, Cross. Because I can't stop time and I can't pull miracles out of my ass."
I looked at the man's face. He wasn't awake. That was a mercy.
I stood and walked to the edge of the barn. Pulled out my comm. It was cracked, but the screen still glowed. The tracker was dead, but the emergency beacon was live. Blinking every six seconds, broadcasting our position to anyone listening.
I could kill it. We'd go dark. Red Hammer wouldn't know where to look.
But neither would anyone else.
I thought about the voice on the comm before we went down. *Don't let Red Hammer get those crates.*
The crates were scattered across three klicks of mud and fire. If Red Hammer wanted them, they were welcome to dig.
I crushed the beacon under my boot.
Cole appeared at my shoulder, breathing hard. "We've got two stretchers. Uh, kind of. Metal and rope. It's not great."
"It'll do. Get everyone who can walk on their feet. We move in fifteen."
"Santos said thirty—"
"Fifteen."
He opened his mouth, then closed it. Nodded. Jogged back.
Leah was still working when I returned. She'd tied off the worst of it and wrapped the man's torso in someone's torn-up jacket. Her hands were steady, but her breathing wasn't.
"We're moving," I said.
"He's not ready."
"He's got fifteen minutes to get ready. After that, we're all dead anyway."
She looked up at me, and for a second I thought she was going to tell me to go to hell. Instead, she wiped her hands on her jeans and stood.
"Help me lift him."
We got the man onto the first stretcher. Cole and another kid took the handles. The second stretcher went to a woman with a broken leg. The third casualty—a teenager with a head wound—we propped between two others. Everyone else grabbed what they could. Packs, water, a couple of rifles someone had pulled from the wreck.
We started moving east, away from the smoke. The tree line was two hundred meters. If we made it that far, we had a chance. If we didn't, it wouldn't matter.
We were fifty meters out when I heard it.
Engines.
Low, heavy, throaty. Not civilian. Not light patrol. Armored.
Leah heard it too. She froze mid-step, then looked back at me. Her face was pale under the grime.
"Cross."
"I know."
Cole's voice cracked. "What do we do?"
I scanned the field. No cover. No time to dig in. If those engines crested the ridge, we were in the open.
I pulled my sidearm and checked the mag. Twelve rounds. Not enough.
The engines got louder.
"Run," I said.
We ran.