Page 91 of His Claim
Her laugh bounced off the trees, easy and genuine. It faded as the terrain began to dip again, swallowing the sound. The treesthinned to reveal the scar of old roads and crumbling concrete structures below. From here, the land looked sick with patches of charred soil, skeletons of cars, and broken towers leaning like tired giants. The world that had existed before the Collapse had long since rotted away, leaving only reminders that humans had once ruled here.
Elsie scanned the area just ahead of us and pointed with her rifle. “There. That’s our way in.”
Nestled into the side of a slope was an old access tunnel, half-hidden by brush, its steel doors rusted and warped by time. It looked dead, but the faint outline of boot prints in the dirt told a different story.
“Watch patrols still use this route,” she murmured. “Stay quiet and be careful. Keep your head down.”
We slipped silently inside, easing the oiled hinges open and closed with barely a whisper.
The air in the tunnels was thick and stale, heavy with the metallic tang of rust and oil. The walls were lined with old wiring and pipes, and every step echoed softly against the stone floor. Elsie lit a small lantern, its dim light spilling over the curved walls, turning the passage into an endless artery leading straight into the city’s underbelly.
For a while, we didn’t speak. The air pressed close, damp and claustrophobic.
Elsie must have felt the tension rolling off me, because she finally spoke. “So,” she inquired, voice casual but quieter than usual, “what was it like for you? Growing up in the city. You, Kendra, and Lia.”
I looked at her, surprised. “You already know what the city was like, don’t you?”
She shrugged, the motion stiff. “Maybe. But I want to hear it from you. We may have grown up in the same place, but on different streets.”
That caught me off guard. I hadn’t thought about her that way before, not as the sarcastic, hard-edged fighter she’d become, but as another girl who’d grown up under the same constant threat of being taken and bred once we turned of age.
Another girl like me.
I exhaled slowly. “We lived in the slums. Broken glass in the streets, burned-out cars for playgrounds. We scavenged what we could. Kendra used to trade scrap for medicine, and Lia would sneak food from patrol drops.”
Elsie gave a dry little laugh, no humor in it. “Sounds familiar. I was a south block kid myself.” We walked a few more steps before she continued, “They came for you too, didn’t they?”
I nodded. “Eventually. Lia and I tried to hide, to run, but they caught me during my escape.”
Elsie’s jaw tightened. “Yeah. They got me, too. I got lucky enough to survive it. Guess you did, too.”
I tried to smile, but it came out crooked. “If you want to call it that. Some days it just feels like I just traded one kind of nightmare for another.”
She gave me a sideways look, her brows drawn together a little bit disapprovingly. “Sweetheart, we’re free, aren’t we? That’s more luck than most.”
“Yeah. That’s true,” I said softly.
The tunnel forked ahead, one path sloping down, the other up toward faint flickers of light. She tilted her chin toward the incline. “Up there. We’re almost under the city.”
We moved carefully, hugging the walls as the sound of muffled voices filtered through the stone. I guessed that it was wolves on rotation, their boots heavy against the floor above. My pulse quickened.
Elsie crouched, motioning for me to follow. “We’ll slip through the maintenance shaft. If we’re lucky, we’ll come up near the southern hangar without being seen. Most of the guards will be watching the outer walls.”
“Lucky?” I whispered. “Since when does luck have anything to do with your plans?”
She grinned. “Since now.”
We squeezed through the narrow passage, climbing hand over hand until the metal grate above came into view. Faint light spilled through the cracks, and the scent of smoke and oil grew stronger.
Elsie peered back at me, then whispered, “Welcome home, sweetheart. We’re back in the wolves’ den.”
I swallowed the fear that rose in my throat and nodded. “Then let’s finish this.”
We listened for several minutes and watched for shadows in the light filtering down to us. Then, sensing the way was clear, together we lifted the grate and crawled back into the belly of the beast.
CHAPTER 24
Mariah
