Free The Darkside War by Zachary Brown Page B

the wind was: air getting sucked out of the cracked top of the human section. It had been half-buried under one of the hills surrounding Tranquility City, where all the rock and dirt came from.
    Keiko lay next to a chunk of roof, a pool of blood slowly spreading around him. I scrabbled over. A supporting beam the size of a car had pinned his leg, bent it, and trapped him in place.
    I saw white bone when I looked underneath. And more blood. It kept pulsing out the ruined mangle of flesh.
    He stirred slightly, a moan of pain, but his glassy eyes looked through me as I grabbed his bloody hand and squeezed it. “Hold on!” I shouted. “Just hold on.”
    I panted and blinked, dizzy and coughing in the dust still whipping around me. How could I stop the bleeding? We didn’t have belts, and there was so much damn blood.
    And I could barely focus. Or breathe.
    Hands behind me pushed a mask against my face. “Take a deep breath.”
    â€œOkay. . . .” I turned. Silvered eyes, purple hair. Behind a similar emergency rebreathing mask.
    â€œWhat’s your name?” she asked.
    â€œDevlin,” I murmured. Then stronger as oxygen cleared my head. “Devlin!”
    â€œI’m Amira.” She kicked off one of her boots and unlaced it. “Give him air too. You take a couple of pulls, give it to him for a couple.”
    â€œRight.” My senses rushed back as my brain got moving again. Three deep breaths, then I got the mask on Keiko. “Do you know what to do?”
    â€œI’m reading instructions right now,” she said, voice muffled behind the rebreather.
    The eyes. The nano-ink tattoos. Like Cee Cee, she could ride invisible bandwidth. A hacker. Full of bioware and other computing and neural hardware. She’d be pulling up entries on how to stop bleeding and following the instructions. I took two pulls on the rebreather, then set it back on Keiko’s face. I couldn’t tell if he was breathing; there was no fog on the glass visor.
    â€œHands up!” came an order shouted so loud my ears buzzed. Struthiforms in thick, full-black armor and helmets ran at us. “Hands up, don’t move.”
    Amira was trying to get the shoelace around Keiko’s thigh and cinch it. Blood soaked the lace, and her fingers dripped red. I moved in front of her and Keiko, my bloody hands in the air. “We’re CPF recruits!” I shouted into the thin air. “We need medical attention for—”
    The head struthiform in the wedge formation struck me with a wing hand. I crumpled to the ground, dizzied by the hit. It held my face down in Keiko’s muddied blood as another Accordance soldier zip-tied my hands.
    â€œIf you continue to struggle, you will be shot.”
    â€œI don’t understand,” I gasped, the dizziness creeping back over me. “We’re CPF. Why are you doing this?”
    Amira looked over, her face also shoved into the ground. “It was a bomb. A human bomb. All humans in Tranquility are getting arrested.”

9
    Amira wriggled her shoulders, stretched, and then pulled free of the zip tie. She rubbed her wrists and put the tie on the table between us.
    â€œHow did you do that?” I asked.
    â€œIsn’t your dad Thomas Hart?”
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œAnd he didn’t teach you to cross your wrists and flex before getting zip-tied? Or how to break them off ?”
    â€œWe never fought the arrests,” I told her. The struthiforms that interrogated me in a separate room had retied my hands in front of me. I held them toward her now. “Can you help?”
    â€œI will. But when they are about to come back, you need to put them back on, got it?”
    â€œDefinitely. I’ll keep them loose around my wrists.”
    She pushed a fingernail in and somehow released the catch. The tie opened up, and I massaged my hands. “Thank you. Thank you for coming over.”
    â€œYou looked ready