for the crew outside.
Then he went cold.
How long had he been in here since the crisis started? Five minutes? Ten? Thirty?
The exact time didn’t really matter. What mattered was that none of the group outside had tried to come in.
The thought made his pulse race. Something was seriously wrong, something that was way beyond this house or even this set of row houses. His people should have broken in by now.
He made himself take a deep breath to calm down, then immediately regretted it because the air tasted of dust. He shone his light around, saw piles of junk and no cloth.
But there was a tablecloth in the other room and if he remembered correctly, it was relatively clean.
He picked his way back in there, as quickly and as carefully as he could, shining the light on Alvina first to make sure she hadn’t moved. Then he grabbed the cloth which was still on the table. Some of the cloth wouldn’t come—it was trapped under the fallen bit of ceiling. But he tugged as hard as he could and the cloth ripped free.
Then he carried it back into the kitchen.
He shone the light on Palmette. Her hands were on top of the debris and they were covered in defensive wounds. Blood oozed from those. A bad slash on the top of her arm, but it avoided the arteries on the underside, at least so far as he could tell.
The bulk of the wounds, though, were on her torso, and he wasn’t sure how to stop them from bleeding.
He could tie off her arms, but he couldn’t tie off her chest.
He wished for the damn links. Somewhere on there, someone or some stupid FAQ file could tell him what to do to tie off wounds, help him be creative with what he had.
But he was on his own here.
He put the light between his teeth and slung the cloth over his shoulder. Then he dug the debris away from her. Her stomach had been slashed, and another slash ran along her thigh.
The thigh wound was bleeding the most. Solution to that one was obvious. He had to tie it off. He ripped some of the cloth, and tied it around her leg (thank God she was thin) and pulled as tight as he could.
He wished he could research her to see if she had signed up for an emergency healing service, something that would close up small wounds with a simple command. She probably didn’t or she would have ordered it the moment the wound happened.
Still, she might not have been thinking clearly—most people didn’t when attacked—or she might have passed out too soon.
Although he doubted she had. She had been the one who was moaning.
He tied off her arms too, and then peered at that stomach wound. It was bad. She’d bleed out, just like that poor man in the living room had.
Nyquist needed supplies and he wasn’t going to get them in here.
He pressed the remaining cloth against her stomach, put something flat, heavy, and unidentifiable over it to hold it in place, hoping that would at least staunch some of this.
Then he wiped his hands on his pants. “I’m going to get help—”
He was going to say her first name to comfort her—people liked hearing their names in moments of crisis—but he couldn’t remember it. He didn’t think calling her Palmette was right.
“I’m going to get help,” he repeated softly. Then he shone his light on that opening into the front room. Part of the ceiling had come down there as well, and blocked the door. But nothing had fallen on the body, oddly enough, and that window seemed remarkably untouched.
So if whatever had blacked out the window wasn’t made of an unbreakable material, he might be able to smash his way out of here.
He had to try.
Six
It felt like climbing a damn mountain to get to the window. A trip that had taken Nyquist only seconds an hour ago now took him at least ten minutes. Ten minutes, he—or more properly, Palmette—didn’t have.
Along the way, he’d found two heavy cylindrical items he could use as cudgels. He had long ago given up trying to figure out what something was. In the dark and