Page 73 of Fated in A Time of War

No armor and weapons. Just skin and scars and the kind of silence that feels like safety.

For one night, war waits outside the door.

CHAPTER 22

ALICE

Morning doesn’t come so much asarrive, crawling in with the weight of a secret nobody wants to hear. No sun. Just this awful gray hush, thick like the air’s holding its breath with the rest of us.

I wake with Krall’s arm heavy across my ribs, his chest warm against my back. He’s breathing slow and deep—steady, like the world isn’t ending today.

I don’t move at first.

There’s something sacred in the silence. A pocket of stillness where nothing hurts yet, where no one’s screaming or bleeding or counting bullets like prayers. His skin smells like smoke and steel and the faint, lingering trace of whatever passes for soap around here. I press a kiss to his shoulder, just above the old scar that runs jagged down his deltoid.

Then I slide out from under his arm.

He doesn’t stir.

I dress in the dim light—pulling on my boots, strapping the sidearm to my thigh, tucking the knife into its sheath at the small of my back. Movements practiced. Mechanical. My hands are steady. My heart is not.

Outside, the camp looks... different.

Not physically. The barricades still lean like drunkards. The tents flap in the breeze. The burnt-out vehicle near the mess tent still leaks that slow drip of oil like a dying heartbeat. But thepeoplehave changed.

It’s in the eyes. That hollow kind of calm. Like the body knows what’s coming even if the mind doesn’t want to name it. I see it in everyone. The cooks. The mechanics. The med techs moving stiffly through triage. There’s no denial left. Just a quiet sort of courage. The resigned kind.

They know.

We all do.

Dr. Anderson stands near the infirmary, arms folded, jaw tight. He’s not barking orders like usual. Just watching. Thinking. Calculating. I nod at him as I pass, and to my surprise, he nods back. No snide remark. No side-eye.

That’s how I know something’s wrong.

“Doc,” I say as I reach him.

He jerks his head. “Walk with me.”

We weave through the edge of the medical tent, past the rows of wounded. Some are still unconscious. Some are awake and pretending not to be scared. One old woman reaches out and squeezes my hand. I squeeze back.

Anderson says nothing until we’re behind the storage crates, near the comms shack that’s been dead for days.

Then he pulls out a rolled piece of paper from inside his vest. Unfurls it between us.

“Map?” I ask, squinting.

He taps it. “Tunnels. Old emergency lines. Probably predates the whole damn camp. Half of it’s collapsed, but some of the shafts run deep enough to get past the Kru perimeter if you time it right.”

I scan the lines—crude, sketched in pencil, annotated with shaky handwriting.

“You planning to run?” I ask, voice low.

He snorts. “Hell no.”

I lift a brow. “Then why show me this?”

Anderson doesn’t look up right away. His finger rests on a tunnel marked ‘R7’—one of the deeper runs, supposedly opening out near the old tram ruins a couple klicks southeast.