“I see her everywhere because she’s in this goddamn cave!” he roars. “I shot her!”

“No, you didn’t. This isn’t a setup. You’re blaming other people for your own guilty conscience. You must leave. All of you. There’s still time to save yourselves. He won’t give you what you want. But he won’t take your lives.”

Hemslock smiles, and this time I am close enough to see how unhinged he is. The reality waiting for him outside these caves is worse than anything he can imagine happening within them.

“Kid,” he says, “if he won’t give me what I ask for, then I’m going to make it impossible for the Diwata to say no.”

And then everything else ceases to matter because he shoots me.

Twenty-Four

Breach

There’s pain.

All I know is the hard rock underneath me, where I am now flat on my back, struggling to breathe. There is a peculiar wetness on my chest that I dimly recognize is blood. It is spreading far too quickly for me to slow or stop.

I can hear Chase shouting, frantic. I feel pressure pushing down on me, and know he is trying to staunch the flow, though I don’t know if he’ll be successful.

My vision is growing dim. The pain is unbearable.

And yet, at the same time, I can see everything. I see, from some heady distance, a bird’s eye view of my own body, of the soldiers who had not moved when I had fallen, of Leo Gries looking horrified, and Hemslock not at all.

With a loud, angry snarl, Askal leaps for Hemslock, and manages to take a huge chunk off his leg. With a shout, the man tries to kick him free, but Askal clings stubbornly. Hemslock turns the gun on him.

There is another shot.

“The fuck are you doing, Hemslock,” Gries whispers, face white.

“Don’t be such a pussy, man,” Hemslock says, calming, shoving the now-unmoving Askal to one side with his boot, then speaking directly to me. “I aimed it pretty carefully. It’s going to hurt like a bitch, but unlike your little mutt, you’ll live. Or you might not, with my next shot.”

“What the hell are you doing?” Gries chokes. “You really think you’re going to get what you want by shooting a teenager and a dog?”

“Don’t you get it yet, you fool? Lapulapu uses Spaniards like Cortes to feed his god, and in exchange he gets to be the most powerful brown bastard in this region. Who’s to say that this little shit hasn’t been doing the same thing? That everyone in this fucking country isn’t in on it and mad that I keep making the necessary sacrifices first? Why do you think this so-called tour guide has been willing to help us when everyone else had been warning us away? I bet you all this talk about a sick father was simply a sob story to gain our trust.”

“Alon’s literally bleeding out, you psychopath!” Chase shrieks at him, still pressing down hard on me. “And you killed Askal!”