There’s another fierce shudder through the ship as I stumble down the boarding ramp. The night is a blur of rain and fire streaming from the heavens. The shapes of Mardenite raiders weave through the clouds above the hillside, moonlight glinting off their dark, rugged bodies.
They’re so much closer than when I saw them before. They’re not small, harmless buzzards anymore—the raiders are bigger than our X-wings and look far more formidable. Real alien warships come to destroy Kiel. Lasers shoot from the tips of their curved, V-shaped wings.
There’s fire all over the hillside in front of me, too much for the rain to put out. A burst of blue flames erupts in the grass at the foot of the boarding ramp. I barely scramble away from it in time. Sam’s soldiers are running all over the place, ducking under pieces of debris to avoid the lasers. Only a few ranks are still standing with their missile guns. I don’t know how long they’re going to be able to stay in one place.
“Now!” Sam yells, somewhere in the chaos.
Missiles fly from the huge guns. Most of them miss their targets—the soldiers underestimated how fast the ships were moving—but one missile hits the wing of a raider, causing it to swerve violently to the left. It falls beyond the hillside, its wing smoking from the explosion.
One raider shot down, but there are at least ten others left. Sam and his troops are far too few to stand a chance against so many ships. They should be running to take cover.
I draw the pulse gun Dean gave me earlier and click off the safety. I shouldn’t care what happens to Sam and his men. All I need to worry about is getting to the forest.
The trees are about twenty yards away, just visible beyond the slope of the wide hillside. Huge pieces of hovercraft debris and an open stretch of sky under which I’ll have no cover from raider fire stand in my way. But there’s nothing else for it—I have to reach the trees.
Go. Now.
I scurry off the boarding ramp. Flames in the grass lick at my boots, and I have to swerve to the left to avoid another laser from the sky. There’s smoke everywhere. Beechy told me to find Dean, but I have no idea where he is. All the soldiers look the same in their armor.
Sam’s soldiers launch another missile and take down a raider. If they had more visibility and better protection from the raider fire—if they’d had time to dig trenches—they might actually have a chance of bringing down most of the swarm. But I don’t see how they’re going to survive for long the way things are. Soon there won’t be any part of the ground not covered in flames.
Already, some of the soldiers are giving up, trying to escape to the trees for cover. A man not far ahead of me stumbles into the path of a Mardenite laser, and he doesn’t have time to scramble out of the way. He lets out a horrible shriek and falls to his knees as the fire sears through his armor.
Bile rises in my throat. I tear my eyes away and race around him.
I’m almost to the forest, but many of the trees on the edge of it are alight with flame. I search frantically for the safest path in—there, on my right-hand side. There’s a massive piece of ship junk in my way, a chunk of the hovercraft hull that tore off during the crash. I duck my head from another laser and scurry around the debris.
That’s when I see Dean running toward me through the smoke. He has an arm over his head to block his helmet from the rain, and his other hand clutches his pulse rifle. He yells at me, “Clementine, get to the trees!”
“I’m trying!”
He reaches me and grabs my sleeve, wrenching me out of the way of another laser. The two of us keep running toward the clear spot between the trees.
Twenty more feet.
Fifteen.
Ten.
Out of the corner of my eye, I see a flash of light. The lights on the wings of a raider soaring overhead. I look up just in time to see an object drop from a hatch in the warship’s underside—something that looks like a grenade. Aiming right for the trees ahead of us.
Every part of me seizes in terror. I try to scramble away from the grenade, but there are too many pieces of debris in my way, and I can’t get anywhere quickly enough.
Dean pushes me to his right, so hard I fall to the ground. I feel his weight press on top of me as he crouches over me, shielding me from the explosion.
There’s a thump as the grenade hits the ground. I brace myself for a BOOM!
But the explosion doesn’t come.
There’s a hissing sound. I lift my head and see the object that fell a few feet away from us. It’s a round object made of some sort of metal, almost like a cam-bot but bigger. Whitish vapor streams from openings in the metal ball, seeping in every direction.
The gas engulfs my body and I feel a burning sensation all over, like someone’s stabbing me in a thousand points with needles.
The vapor is poison.