Chapter 16: Baptism in Blood
The van’s engine developed a worrisome rattle as it climbed into the mountains. Each switchback road was narrower, the drop-offs steeper. Pine trees crowded in, their shadows stretching long and thin in the late afternoon light. The air streaming through the broken window was clean and biting. Loid drove with a focused calm that belied the feverish heat she could feel radiating from his side every time she shifted close.
Yor watched his hands on the wheel. Pale, knuckles white, but steady. She watched the landscape, too, but not with a tourist’s eye. She noted potential ambush points: that blind curve, that overgrown pull-off, the sheer rock face that could hide a sniper’s perch. Her body was one sustained ache, a catalogue of the sewer fight and the fall from the container. The knife wound on her forearm, shallow but neglected, throbbed in time with her heartbeat.
In the back, Anya was too quiet. She wasn’t playing with Bond or asking a thousand questions. She just stared out the window, her small face pressed to the glass.
“Does your head hurt?” Yor asked, turning in her seat.
Anya shook her head slowly. “It’s loud.”
“The engine?”
“The thinking,” Anya whispered. “People are thinking really loud about us.”
A cold knot tightened in Yor’s stomach. She glanced at Loid. His eyes flicked to the rearview mirror. “How many people?” he asked, his voice carefully neutral.
“Don’t know. Far away. Like… shouting in a big room.” Anya rubbed her temples. “It’s fuzzy. But it’s mean.”
The Garden’s network. The SSS bulletin. Rumors spreading through the underworld about a valuable asset on the run. The collective “thinking” of their pursuers was a psychic fog Anya was drowning in. Yor reached back and squeezed her knee. “Try to think about Bond. Or that silly cartoon penguin. Can you do that?”
Anya nodded, closing her eyes, burying her face in Bond’s neck.
They found the landmark as the last of the sun gilded the mountain peaks. The ruined church was a skeleton of stone perched above a furious, slate-grey river. The roof had long since caved in. Ivy choked the empty window frames. The road ended in a patch of gravel littered with beer bottles and fire-ring ashes. It was a dead place.
Loid killed the engine. The silence was profound, broken only by the relentless rush of water far below.
“This is it,” he said, not sounding convinced. “The crossing should be directly below. A smuggler’s cable ferry. Manual.”
“Should be,” Yor echoed.
They got out, moving stiffly. Bond bounded ahead, nose to the ground, circling the church ruins. Loid leaned against the van’s warm hood, his breathing a little too shallow. Yor went to the cliff edge. The river was a roaring ribbon maybe two hundred feet down, white with rapids. She scanned the opposite bank—thick, untouched forest. Westalis. It looked no different.
There was no ferry. No cable. Just a sheer drop and violent water.
“He lied,” she said, the words flat. “The man in the yard. He gave you a lie to send us over a cliff.”
Loid didn’t respond. He was staring at the church, his mind visibly working, rewinding the confrontation, analyzing the man’s panic, his words. “No,” he said finally. “It was truth. He was too scared to fabricate something that specific. Which means the crossing is here. It’s just not visible from the top.”
He pushed off the hood and walked toward the ruins, his steps deliberate. Yor followed. Anya trailed behind, holding Bond’s collar.
Inside the shell of the church, the light was dappled and green. The floor was dirt and broken tiles. At the far end, where an altar might have stood, was a pile of collapsed stone. Loid began moving the smaller rocks. His face was grey with effort.
“Help me.”
Yor joined him. They worked in silence, the only sounds their grunts and the scuff of stone on stone. After moving a large, mossy slab, they found it. Not a passage, but a metal ring set into a solid-looking wooden hatch, camouflaged with dirt and debris.
Loid grabbed the ring and heaved. The hatch opened with a groan of rusted hinges, revealing a yawning blackness and the smell of damp rock and stagnant air. A crude ladder, bolted into the stone, descended into the gloom. From deep below, they could now hear it—the echo of the river, louder, more personal.
“A descent to water level,” Loid breathed. “The ferry’s down there, hidden from aerial surveillance.”
It made sense. It was also a perfect trap. A single choke point. Once down, there was no way back up but this ladder.
Bond whined, the hair on his back rising. He looked from the hatch to the tree line and back, a low growl building in his chest.
“He’s never wrong,” Anya said, her voice tiny.
Yor’s knives were in her hands before she fully processed the thought. Loid had the stolen pistol out, his back to the church wall, eyes scanning the empty windows.
They came not from the woods, but from the road. Two dark sedans, kicking up gravel, blocking the van. Doors opened. Six men. Not SSS in their crisp suits. These were different. Harder, dressed in practical tactical gear, their faces devoid of anything resembling mercy. The Garden’s clean-up crew. Yor recognized the efficient, predatory way they spread out. No demands, no dialogue. Assets to be sanitized.
“Anya,” Loid said, soft and clear. “The hatch. Now. Climb down and don’t look back.”
“But—”
“Now!”
The first shot splintered the stone arch above Yor’s head. Anya screamed. Bond shoved her toward the opening with his snout. She scrambled onto the ladder, disappearing into the dark.
Yor and Loid moved as one. They didn’t retreat. They attacked. Surprise was their only remaining currency.
Yor flung a knife. It took the lead operative in the throat. He gagged, stumbling. She was already sprinting, not away, but parallel to the church wall, drawing fire. Bullets chewed the ground at her heels.
Loid used the distraction. He fired twice. Double tap. A man dropped. He was leveraging the pistol’s limited range, making them commit to closer movement.
They were professionals. They adapted instantly, using the sedans for cover, laying down suppressing fire. A round caught Loid in the meat of his left thigh. He didn’t cry out. He staggered, went down on one knee behind a fallen column, and returned fire, his aim still terrifyingly precise.
Yor was in among them. She became a whirlwind of sharp, terminal physics. A knife-hand strike to a trachea. A stolen gun pressed under a jaw. The reports were deafening in the confined space. She took a glancing blow to the shoulder from a rifle butt. The bone vibrated with pain. She used the momentum to spin, driving her elbow into the attacker’s nose.
Two were down. Three remained, plus the driver of the second car who hung back, a long-range rifle now in his hands.
Loid’s pistol clicked empty. He threw it, hitting one man in the face, and lunged for a dropped weapon. The rifleman saw his chance and took aim.
Bond moved like a brown missile. He wasn’t attacking the rifleman. He crashed into the sedan the man was using for cover, rocking it violently on its suspension. The shot went wide.
Yor used the second of chaos. Her last knife flew, finding the rifleman’s eye. He fell.
The final operative, a large man with cold eyes, closed with Loid. They grappled for the gun on the ground. Loid was weakened, bleeding from his side and his leg. The man got on top of him, hands going for Loid’s throat.
Yor was out of weapons. She saw a piece of broken altar stone, a jagged shard the size of a dinner plate. She didn’t throw it. She ran and brought it down on the back of the man’s skull with all her strength. The sound was wet and final.
Silence, punctuated by the river’s roar and their ragged breathing.
Loid pushed the dead man off him. He looked up at Yor, his face smeared with dirt and blood. “The ladder,” he gasped. “Go.”
“You first.”
He tried to stand. His leg buckled. Yor hauled his arm over her shoulders, taking his weight. They stumbled toward the hatch. Bond was there, circling them, hackles still raised.
“They’ll have called it in,” Loid muttered, pain clipping his words. “More will come.”
“Then we stop talking.”
She helped him onto the ladder. He descended clumsily, each rung a negotiated torture. Yor followed, pulling the heavy hatch shut above them. Total darkness. The air was cold and smelled of wet rust. She could hear Loid’s labored breathing below, the scuff of his boots, and further down, Anya’s whimpering.
“I’m here, Anya,” Yor called, her voice echoing. “Keep going.”
The ladder seemed endless. Her shoulders burned. Finally, her boots hit wet stone. A faint, greenish light filtered from somewhere. They were in a cavern at the river’s edge. The noise was tremendous, water crashing against rocks. And there it was—a crude wooden platform, and hanging above the raging water, a rusted cable system with a small, flat-bottomed ferry boat attached by pulleys. It was a hand-over-hand operation, a braided rope looped through a primitive winch mechanism.
Anya was huddled by the platform, soaked from spray, her eyes huge. Loid collapsed against the cavern wall, sliding down to sit, clutching his bleeding thigh.
Yor went to the mechanism. It was stiff, corroded. She gripped the rope. It bit into her palms. She pulled.
Nothing.
She planted her feet, threw her weight back. With a shriek of metal on metal, the cable moved an inch. The ferry swayed out over the furious water.
“Yor,” Loid said. He was trying to stand again.
“Stay. Put pressure on your leg.” She pulled again. Her muscles screamed in protest. Another inch. Another. It was a massive physical equation against the drag of the water and decayed machinery. Her world narrowed to the rope, the fire in her hands and back, the roar of the river.
She heard a scraping from above. Footsteps on the ladder. They were out of time.
With a guttural cry she didn’t recognize as her own, she hauled with every ounce of strength left in her body. The ferry lurched, sliding along the cable toward them, now halfway across the river’s span.
“Get on!” she screamed.
Anya scrambled onto the unstable platform. Bond leapt. Loid dragged himself aboard. Yor released the rope and jumped, landing in a heap at the bottom of the ferry as it swung wildly.
From the cavern ledge, a shape appeared. A Garden operative, pistol raised.
Loid, lying on his back, fumbled the small pistol from the van’s thief from his pocket. He fired. The shot went wide, but it made the man duck back.
“The winch!” Loid yelled.
Yor saw it. The corresponding winch on the Westalis side was a dark smudge against the wet rock. The ferry was stalled in the middle of the cable, a brittle wooden plate suspended over the chewing water. They were sitting targets.
Another gunshot. Wood splintered near Yor’s head. The operative on the ledge was aiming for the cable itself.
“He severs it, we’re gone,” Loid shouted over the roar. He was trying to sit up, to aim again, but his hand was shaking badly from blood loss.
Yor didn’t think. She just moved. She grabbed the hauling rope on their side, the one that would pull them to the far bank. It was thick, slimy with algae. She wrapped it around her forearms, leaned back with her entire weight, and walked herself down the length of the small ferry.
The mechanism shrieked. The ferry jerked forward a foot.
Another shot. This one sparked off the metal pulley above them. Anya screamed, covering her head. Bond stood over her, a low, continuous snarl vibrating through the deck.
Yor pulled again. Her shoulders felt like they were separating. The old wound on her forearm tore open, staining the rope with a dark, spreading wetness. She tasted salt and river spray. Each inch was a war.
Loid fired. The pistol bucked in his hand. The operative on the ledge flinched back.
“Again, Yor! Now!” Loid’s voice was raw, stripped down to pure will.
She gave a final, heaving pull, her boots slipping on the slick wood. The ferry surged the last few yards, banging hard against the Westalis rock. The impact jarred through them all.
They weren't safe. The winch was here, but the operative there would follow. He’d simply haul himself across once they were clear.
“Anya, Bond, off! Go into the trees!” Yor barked, untying the rope from the ferry’s cleat with clumsy, bleeding fingers.
Loid understood. He dragged himself to the edge, looking back across the churning gap. The operative was already grabbing the other side’s rope, preparing to pull himself over. Loid raised the pistol. His vision swam. He fired.
The shot missed the man but struck the wooden handle of the winch on the Ostanian side, splintering it.
“The cable,” Loid gasped. “Cut the cable.”
Yor’s last knife was gone. She scanned the rocky ledge, her eyes landing on a sharp, finger-like protrusion of rusted metal where the winch’s housing had cracked. She grabbed the cable that anchored their ferry, the thick steel braid now slack, and dragged it with a screaming effort across the sharp metal edge.
It was like trying to saw through a tree trunk with a dull spoon. Sparks flew. The cable groaned.
The operative was coming. Hand over hand, his body a dark pendulum over the water.
Yor sawed harder, putting her back into it, the frayed steel wires lacerating her palms. Loid tried to crawl toward her to help, but his leg gave out. He could only watch, helpless, as the distance between them and their pursuer vanished.
With a final, metallic shriek, the cable parted.
The sound was catastrophic. The operative had time for one widened glance before the tension on his side vanished. He and the ferry plummeted, swallowed instantly by the white fury of the rapids. The severed cable whipped back through the air like a steel serpent before slapping against the cliff face.
Silence, except for the river’s indifferent roar.
Yor sank to her knees, her hands ruined, blood dripping freely between her fingers onto the stone. Loid let his head fall back against the rock, eyes closed, the empty pistol slipping from his grip.
They’d made it. They were in Westalis.
The cold of the stone seeped through Yor’s clothes. The adrenaline was gone, leaving a hollow, trembling exhaustion so deep it felt like death. She looked at her hands. The cuts were deep, packed with rust and fiber. They’d need stitches. Everything hurt.
“Loid?”
His breathing was too fast, too shallow. The makeshift bandage on his thigh was saturated, a deep crimson blooming through the fabric of his pants. His skin had a waxy pallor.
“Hey.” She crawled to him. “Look at me.”
His blue eyes opened, but they struggled to focus. “Inventory,” he whispered, the spy’s habit persisting. “One child. One dog. One wife.”
“One husband,” she said, her voice cracking. She put her less-injured hand on his cold cheek. “Stay with me. We need to move. They might have others on this side.”
He nodded, a faint, weak motion. “Up there. The tree line. Find cover.”
Getting him upright was a nightmare. He was dead weight, consciousness flickering. She looped his arm around her neck, ignoring the blaze of pain in her own shoulder, and stood. They staggered away from the river’s edge, a three-legged stumble toward the dark wall of pines.
Anya was there, clutching Bond, her face streaked with dirt and tears. She didn’t speak. She just turned and led the way, picking a path into the deeper darkness under the trees.
They went perhaps two hundred meters. It was far enough. Loid’s knees buckled. They went down together in a soft nest of pine needles and moss, the canopy blotting out the sky.
Yor worked quickly in the near-dark. She used Loid’s belt as a tourniquet high on his thigh, tightening it until the bleeding slowed to a seep. She packed the wound with moss from a clean, dry rock crevice, then bound it tightly with strips torn from her already-ruined shirt.
His eyes were closed. His pulse under her fingers was a frantic, thin flutter.
“Loid. Stay awake.”
“Tired, Yor.” His words were slurred. “So tired.”
“I know.” She lay down beside him on the cold ground, facing him, her body curving around his injured side to share what little heat she had left. She pressed her forehead against his. “But you don’t get to be tired yet. We’re not home.”
He didn’t answer. Anya wriggled in close on his other side, her small body shivering violently. Bond settled around them, a living blanket of fur, his breath making clouds in the chilling air.
Yor stared up through the pine branches at a sliver of indifferent sky. Her hands throbbed in time with her heartbeat. Every muscle protested. They were across the river, but they were lost, bleeding, and hunted in a country that was supposed to be sanctuary.
Loid’s breathing evened out, but it was still too fast. She listened to it, counting each inhalation. The only plan left was the next ten minutes. Then the next.
Somewhere in the distance, an owl called. The wind moved through the high branches with a sound like a slow exhalation. Anya’s shivering gradually subsided as Bond’s warmth seeped into her.
“Mama?” Anya whispered, her voice raw.
“Yes, sweetheart?”
“Is Papa going to die?”
Yor’s throat closed. She looked at Loid’s profile, pale and sharp against the dark moss. She remembered the taste of rust and his mouth in the shaking train container, a moment that already felt like a dream from another lifetime.
“No,” Yor said, and the word was a vow, spoken into the skin of his temple. “He is not allowed.”
The cold was a living thing, seeping up from the ground and through their clothes. It bit at Yor’s raw hands and crept into the spaces between their bodies. Loid’s shivering had stopped, which was worse. His skin was clammy under her touch.
“Hey,” she whispered, shaking him gently. “Don’t you dare.”
His eyelids fluttered. A faint, grim smile touched his lips. “Orders, Thorn Princess?”
“Yes.” Her voice was thick. “Stay awake. That’s an order.”
Anya sat up, rubbing her eyes. She looked at Loid’s pale face, then at Yor’s blood-crusted hands. Her small features tightened with a determination that seemed too old for her. “Bond,” she said, her voice losing its whispery fear. “Find help.”
The great white dog lifted his massive head. He sniffed the air deeply, his wet nose twitching. He looked at Anya, then at the dense woods behind them. With a soft whuff, he rose and trotted into the trees, disappearing into the gloom.
“He’s looking for a… a safe feeling,” Anya said, trying to explain the images in her head. “A warm feeling. Not far.”
Yor had no strength to question it. She believed the dog. She had to. She focused on Loid, tapping his cheek. “Talk to me. About anything. The first meal you want when we’re out of this.”
He was silent for so long she feared he’d slipped away. “Pancakes,” he finally mumbled. “With real butter. Not that margarine spread.”
A wet laugh escaped her. It sounded like a sob. “That’s what you want? Pancakes?”
“And coffee. Terrible, bitter, hospital-grade coffee.”
“You’re ridiculous.” She pressed her forehead against his again, feeling the feverish heat beginning to bloom. His breaths were shallow puffs of white in the dark air.
Bond returned ten minutes later. He nudged Yor’s arm with his nose, then turned and looked back the way he came, tail giving a single, deliberate wag.
“What is it, boy?” she asked.
He took a few steps, stopped, and looked back at them.
“He found it,” Anya said, scrambling to her feet. “It’s a… a broken house. But warm.”
Getting Loid upright was an agony of muffled groans and strained muscles. Yor took his full weight, her legs trembling with the effort. They moved as a single, stumbling organism, following Bond’s ghostly white form through the bracken. The path was uneven, hidden by ferns and fallen branches that snagged at their feet.
The “broken house” was a forester’s watchtower, long abandoned. One side had partially collapsed, and the roof sagged, but it was a cave of sorts, shelter from the wind. Bond nudged open the rotting door with his head.
Inside was the smell of damp wood and animal musk. A broken chair lay in a corner. A rusty, pot-bellied stove stood cold on a stone hearth. It was a tomb, but it was their tomb.
Yor half-carried, half-dragged Loid to a relatively dry corner, easing him down against the wall. “Anya, look for anything we can use. Blankets, cans, anything.”
While Anya and Bond nosed around the single room, Yor tore more strips from her ruined shirt. She used the last of the clean water from the canteen to wash Loid’s thigh wound. It was ugly, inflamed, and still oozing. She packed it again with the last of the clean moss and bound it tight.
His hand found hers, his fingers cold and weak. “Your hands,” he said, his voice gravelly.
“They’ll heal.”
“They’re a mess.” He tried to sit up straighter, grimacing. “We need a plan. We can’t stay here long.”
“The plan is for you to not die of infection,” Yor said, the words coming out harsher than she intended. She was so tired. “Everything else is tomorrow.”
“They’ll have dogs. Thermal imaging from helicopters at first light.” His spy’s mind was stubbornly spinning, even as his body failed. “We need distance.”
“We need you to be able to walk.”
“Found something!” Anya called from the other side of the stove. She held up a small, rusted tin. It was airtight. Inside were damp matches, a stub of a candle, and a tightly rolled length of fishing line with a few hooks.
It was a treasure trove.
“Good girl,” Yor breathed, taking the tin. She struck a match. It flared, a tiny, miraculous sun in the dark. She lit the candle stub and dripped wax onto a floorboard to secure it. The light pushed back the shadows, revealing the hopelessness of their shelter in greater detail.
It also revealed Loid’s face properly. He looked gaunt, his eyes sunken. But he was watching her, a quiet intensity in his gaze that had nothing to do with fever.
“We should risk a small fire in the stove,” he said. “Just to take the edge off. The chimney might draw the smoke up and disperse it through the trees.”
Yor nodded. Anya helped her gather dry tinder from the collapsed parts of the hut. Soon, a tiny, reluctant flame was crackling behind the stove’s iron door. The heat it gave off was pathetic, but it was real.
They huddled close to it. Anya fell asleep almost instantly, curled into Bond’s side. Yor tended the tiny fire, her ruined hands held out to the warmth.
“You should sleep,” Loid said softly.
“So should you.”
“I can’t. My mind… it won’t stop.” He was silent for a moment, watching the orange light flicker through the stove’s vents. “I keep replaying it. The yard. The ferry. You pulling that cable.”
“You were busy getting shot,” she said, aiming for lightness and missing.
A ghost of a smile touched his lips again. “A poor division of labor.”
The candle guttered, drowning them in near-darkness again, with only the faint glow from the stove vents. In the dim red light, his voice came low. “Why did you do it? In the sewer. You could have left. Taken Anya and run. The Garden wouldn’t have followed you if you’d handed her over.”
Yor stared at the glowing vents. The answer was so vast it had no edges. It was in the weight of Anya’s head on her shoulder during a movie. It was in the taste of shared, poorly cooked meals. It was in the silent understanding that passed between them over a sleeping child’s head.
“She calls me Mama,” Yor said, the simple words cracking as they left her throat. “They don’t get to have her.”
Loid was quiet for a long time. The wind picked up outside, sighing through the broken slats of the tower. “I thought… I thought the mission was everything. The only thing.”
“And now?”
“Now I’m in a collapsing shack in Westalis, bleeding out, and I can’t think of a single national secret that matters more than the fact that Anya likes her eggs sunny-side up and you…” He stopped, his breath catching. “And you laughed at my pancake request.”
Yor moved then. She crossed the small space between them and took his face in her battered hands. She kissed him, not with the desperate fury of the train, but with a slow, aching certainty. His lips were chapped and cold, but they yielded, then responded. It was a kiss of shared exhaustion, of a choice made not once, but over and over again since a sunny day in a fake interview.
When she pulled back, his eyes were open, reflecting the stove’s dull glow. “We get pancakes,” she whispered, her thumb tracing the line of his jaw. “After. All of us. Together.”
He leaned his forehead against hers, his body sagging against her as the last of his formidable will finally surrendered to his injuries. “Deal,” he breathed.
She held him upright as his consciousness finally slipped away, listening to the ragged sound of his breathing even out into something deeper, more vulnerable. She held him long after the candle burnt out and the small fire died to embers, keeping watch in the absolute dark, her own eyes wide open.
Dawn arrived as a thin, grey light filtering through the cracks. It found them still entangled on the floor, a tangle of wounded limbs and shared warmth. Bond’s head lifted first, ears pricked. Anya stirred, blinking sleepily.
A new sound threaded through the sighing pines.
Not the chop of helicopter blades. Not the baying of dogs.
It was the distant, lonesome whistle of a train. Not a freight train. A passenger train, moving slow on a distant track.
Loid’s eyes opened. He’d heard it too. Somewhere, beyond these woods, there was a track. And where there was a track, there were stations. Towns. A way forward.
He met Yor’s gaze. The same reckoning passed between them. Staying here was death. Moving was a risk. But the sound was a thread, a possible path woven through the wilderness.
“We follow the sound,” he said, his voice a dry husk.
Yor nodded. She helped him sit up, his body stiff and hot with fever. “Lean on me.”
“You can’t carry us both.”
“Watch me.”
They moved toward the door, a broken trio limping into the weak morning light. The train whistle sounded again, clearer now, a hopeful punctuation mark on the silence. It was heading east, deeper into Westalis.
Toward an unknown future, away from a buried past. They followed it.