The first Ork's weapon was heavy.

  Eve knew this the way she knew most physical things — immediately, completely, from the moment her hands closed around it. Heavy and unbalanced and built for something with three times her mass and twice her reach, crude in the way all Ork things were crude, more slab of jagged rusted metal than anything deserving to be called a weapon.

  She swung it anyway.

  The impact took the second Ork across the midsection and the sound it made was enormous — not the sound of something being hit, but the sound of something being moved, the whole massive body of it lifting slightly off the ground before it crashed sideways into the wall. The wall cracked. The Ork slid down it leaving a green smear and did not get up.

  Eve didn't watch it finish falling. She was already turning.

  The third one had been watching. It was bigger than the other two — broader across the shoulders, its makeshift armor thicker, bolted-on plates of scavenged metal covering its chest and upper arms. Its eyes were small and bright and carried the particular intelligence of an Ork that had survived enough fights to take something away from them. It looked at her. At the weapon in her hands. At its two companions on the floor.

  It didn't come straight at her.

  It came from the side, circling, putting the debris between them, making her work for the angle.

  Smarter.

  She let it come. Watched the arc of its arm as it wound back, read the weight of the swing before it started — the way the shoulder dropped, the way the feet planted — and stepped inside it entirely, past the reach of the weapon, close enough that it couldn't use the length of its arm anymore. She drove the butt of the slab up hard under its jaw with both hands behind it.

  The crack of it echoed off the walls.

  The Ork's head snapped back. It staggered — one step, two — and she followed it, not giving it the space to recover, hitting it again across the temple and again across the back of the neck as it buckled, and on the third strike the corridor wall behind it stopped it from going any further and it stayed there, propped against the cracked stone, not moving.

  Eve stepped back.

  Three.

  Breathed.

  Her Blank field was still pushed out wide — she could feel it, the emptiness radiating outward from her in all directions, pressing into the walls and the floor and the air and anything that came within reach of it. The wrongness of her, expanded and present and not pulling back the way it usually did when Lilith was close.

  The adrenaline was still running. That new thing, that sharp rushing bright thing she'd felt for the first time minutes ago — still there, still alive, making everything precise and immediate and clear in a way that had no equivalent in anything she'd felt before.

  Alive.

  She turned the word over. It felt accurate.

  But underneath it—

  Wrong.

  She stood in the corridor and tried to locate the feeling more exactly, because Eve preferred to understand things rather than simply carry them. The adrenaline was there. The clarity was there. The field was there.

  But underneath all of it, something quiet and persistent sat wrong.

  Lilith.

  The thread was still there — she could feel it, the constant unbroken fact of it, the thing that had existed since Lilith first filled the space that Eve hadn't known was empty. Still present. Still connected.

  But different.

  Different how.

  She didn't have an answer. And not having an answer was the source of the wrong feeling, and Lilith was somewhere at the end of the thread, and she needed to—

  Movement.

  Three more Orks came through the gap in the outer wall at the far end of the corridor — pushing through the broken stone like it was an inconvenience, shaking dust and plaster off their shoulders, already making the noise they made, that rolling bellowing sound that had nothing mechanical in it.

  Eve looked at them.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  More.

  She rolled her shoulders, adjusted her grip on the slab, and moved first.

  The first one didn't see her until she was already inside its reach.

  She went low — under the wild opening swing it threw out of reflex — and hit it in the side of the knee with everything she had behind it. The joint didn't buckle cleanly. It gave in stages, wrong and grinding, and the Ork dropped sideways with a sound that was more surprise than pain, and she was past it before it hit the ground.

  The second had a real weapon. Proper, by Ork standards — a length of metal with a crude blade welded to one end, long enough to give it reach, and it knew how to use that reach. It kept her back with short, probing swings, reading the distance, not committing until it thought it had her.

  She let it think it had her.

  She took one swing on the forearm — it hurt, the metal edge catching bone, and she noted the pain and set it aside — and used the momentum of it to spin inside the next one, got both hands on the blade end and wrenched sideways. The grip broke. The weapon clattered to the floor. The Ork stared at its empty hands for exactly the amount of time she needed to put it down.

  Down.

  The third one had watched all of this.

  It was the largest of the three — a full head taller than the others, its armor thicker, its weapon a heavy rusted thing it held in both hands. It looked at her with the expression of something recalculating. The Blank field was pressing against it now and she could see it working — the way the certainty kept draining out of the creature's eyes, replaced by something confused and wrong, some deep instinct screaming at it that something about this small girl was fundamentally not right.

  It swung anyway. Big and committed and slow.

  Eve ducked it completely, came up underneath, drove the top of her own weapon into its chin and then its throat in two fast strikes, and when it doubled forward she stepped aside and let its own weight do the rest.

  It hit the floor hard.

  Still.

  She lowered the slab and turned toward the library.

  She was raising her foot to step over the nearest body when she heard it — heavy, fast, purposeful — the specific sound of power armor at full stride, and Ha'ken came around the corner at the far end of the corridor.

  He had his flamer up and two Orks behind him.

  Not chasing him — he was leading them, pulling them down the corridor deliberately, giving himself the room and the angle he wanted. The Orks were big and loud and completely focused on the green-armored giant in front of them, and they had perhaps two seconds of that focus left.

  Ha'ken planted his feet.

  The flamer spoke.

  It wasn't like the lasguns outside — the crack and snap of those was sharp and surgical. This was wide and immediate and consuming, a wash of Promethean fire that filled the corridor from wall to wall and left no question about outcomes. The Orks made sounds briefly. Then they didn't make sounds.

  Ha'ken lowered the flamer.

  He looked at the corridor. Took it in fully, the way he took most things in — steadily, completely, without rushing the assessment. The cracks in the walls. The Orks on the floor. The weapon Eve had set down. Eve herself, standing in the middle of all of it, her forearm dark where the blade had caught her, otherwise unmarked.

  He looked at her for a long moment.

  She couldn't read his expression fully. But something in it had shifted from what it usually was.

  "Eve," he said.

  "I need to go to Lilith," she said.

  "Why are you outside." Not quite a question. "You were supposed to be in the shelter."

  "We needed to find our friend." She kept her voice level. "Lysander. He wasn't in the shelter with the others."

  Ha'ken was quiet. She could see the directive forming — the breath he took, the slight adjustment in his posture, the shape of something about to be said.

  He looked at the corridor again.

  At the six Orks on the floor. At the walls they had partially become. At the weapon she'd set down with the ease of someone setting down something that had briefly been useful and was now not needed.

  The directive didn't come.

  Something moved through his expression that she didn't have the vocabulary for yet.

  "Go," he said.

  Eve was already moving.

  The library door was open.

  She slowed as she reached it — not hesitation, just the change in what she was hearing. The corridor behind her still had the distant layered noise of the battle outside, the las-fire and the grinding and the rolling Ork sound. But ahead of her the library was quiet.

  Finished.

  Something in here had already finished.

  She stepped inside.

  The debris registered distantly. The shelves knocked sideways, books across the floor. The destroyed Ork against the far wall, twisted in the grotesque way she recognized now. Broken pages drifting in the air disturbed by her entry.

  She saw Sister Marian first — sitting on the floor, which was wrong, Sister Marian did not sit on floors — and then she saw whose hands Sister Marian was holding.

  Then she saw what Lilith was holding.

  Eve stopped.

  Lilith.

  She was on the floor, rocking very slightly, the tears running freely down her face. The gold eye was glowing faint and steady, casting a small warm light that had no business being warm in a room that felt like this. Her voice was barely above a whisper.

  You won't die. You won't die. You won't die.

  Eve looked at Lysander.

  Small. Still. The smile still on his face — open and unguarded, the one that had never learned to be anything other than completely itself, right to the very last moment.

  Still.

  The adrenaline left her body.

  All at once. Like something switching off cleanly. And what moved in behind it came slowly — not sharp, not clean, nothing like a fight. Just heavy. Moving into her chest the way something moved when it had decided it was staying.

  Heavy.

  She looked at his hands. Small hands. Hands that had spent weeks carefully making something for two girls who were going away, drawing dragons for Eve and three stick figures holding hands and a secret written in the only language he'd had for it.

  Her own hands hung at her sides and didn't know what to do.

  What do I do.

  She didn't know. She had known — thirty seconds ago she had known exactly what to do with her hands and had done it without hesitation or question, had done it through six Orks and a corridor and the whole bright running edge of the adrenaline. Now they just hung there, empty and uncertain, and she had no answer for them.

  Lilith's voice kept going.

  You won't die. You won't die. You won't die.

  Eve stood in the doorway and listened to her sister say the thing that wasn't true anymore and didn't move and didn't speak and the heavy thing in her chest sat there quietly and didn't go anywhere at all.