“Ro . . . we need to get the weapons.” Deimos stroked her hair back, whispering. “No one’s gotten up, but we can’t be sure they didn’t hear. There was a bit of noise.”

The weapons. More killing. The thought echoed to her through a long, dark tunnel. “Y-yes.” Her lips formed the word. She heard the sound from spectator seats.

Phobos shrugged out of his shirt and pulled it over her numb body. “She’s in shock,” he said to Deimos.

This wasn’t shock. Romy felt like she was hovering outside of herself. This had never happened when she killed the Critamal. What was it? Because she’d killed with her own hands?

“Maybe we should take her back first?” Deimos said to Phobos.

A fresh shot of adrenaline helped to push the blurriness back. Her friends needed her. They didn’t have time for her to freak out. The clanging in her mind didn’t recede, and she had to work to move her mouth around it.

“No.” Romy managed to speak. “N-no. I’m okay.” She lifted wooden arms and pushed her hair back, wet with Lucas’s blood. She looked up at the doubtful members of her knot. “Let’s do this,” she repeated in a hollow voice.

Not waiting for an answer, she led the way. Her feet dragging with each step, she retreated behind a couple of rows of houses as they moved around the clearing. Atlas couldn’t find them. Not when they were so close to escape. She wondered if he was sitting in his office. Or laying awake in his bed. The bed they’d shared as he plotted to betray everyone she loved.

It was easy to move around the camp. No patrols worked within the settlement. She crept up to the storage building steps, Phobos and Deimos behind her.

The e-storage screen was shining in the room to the left, and the keypad to the weapons room, a tiny red flashing circle at its base, was to their right. Phobos passed the keycard into her outstretched hand and Romy waved it under the keypad.

The red light flashed green and the door clicked open.

She waved the twins through. “Go, get the . . . the supplies. I n-need something from the e-scanner.”

Her grip on the keycard was slippery. She staggered under the weight of the ringing in her head to the illuminated machine in the far corner.

Rocking with pain, it took her three attempts to push the keycard through.

Red files loaded on the screen in front of her disjointed vision. They needed to put as much ground between themselves and this camp by the first siren tomorrow morning.

Romy scrolled through the documents, blinking often to refocus. Rosters, incident reports, weapons registry.

One section caught her eye: HIGHLY CLASSIFIED.

She clicked on the heading.