Read Ruptured: The Cantati Chronicles for Free Online

second-guessed by others, but in my book if you could sleep at night over the choices you made, you did the right thing.
    Quinten would be the best choice by far. He wasn’t a golden boy by a long shot. A very scrappy fighter, he had an intelligent mind that grasped situations often far beyond my understanding. He was calmer than the rest of them. I often considered him the scholar of the bunch. If our lives, and our world, had been different, I could picture him teaching a group of students in a university. When we were not training or on a mission such as this, he tended to be in a corner of the Tower grounds with a book he’d borrowed from the Council Library.
    The five-mile route we chose would lead us far enough away from Cade’s squad. I knew the paths to the wall by memory. My life, all of our lives, existed within ten miles: the wall was no more than a five-mile radius from the Compound. The majority of the buildings we passed were vacant. People were not willing to live outside the confines of the Compound any longer. When I was a child, these buildings had held life, where presently they were nothing more than tombs. They stood as blatant reminders of all humanity had lost.
    Quinten, on point, signaled a halt at the last mile before we reached our objective rally point. Sending my feelers out for energy signatures, I came across only ours. As we neared the rally point, Quinten stayed on lead, while Ben, Luke, and Nick fanned out in a two, six, and ten o’clock formation. I brought up the rear of our company.
    Quinten motioned forward with a flick of his wrist, and our company crept along the final alley that led to the wall. At the corner, Quinten came up short and held up his fist. I signaled for him to move forward, and he shook his head no.
    And that’s when I heard the clicking scrap of claws against pavement.
    Bloody hell!
    I needed to quit thinking about my impending motherhood and focus on the task before me. Otherwise, I would get my men killed. I dropped my shields, feeling for energy signatures. My internal siren blared code red at the sheer numbers in the alley. There had to be at least a dozen. I signaled the numbers to Luke and Ben with instructions to head back around and cut off the escape route for these things.
    They nodded their understanding and took off down the direction we had come. This left me with Quinten and Nick. I caught Quinten’s gaze, the warmth I usually saw replaced with a steely resolve. He’d do well as lieutenant if the general passed him the mantle.
    A silent conversation passed between us.
    Nick and I will ambush them on this side. You watch our six.
    Agreed.
    I nodded my head at his assent. I trusted his judgment at defending our backs more than Nick. It was not that Nick was competent, he was, but he was young enough, and cocky enough to make fatal mistakes.
    I signaled Nick, and he fell into step beside me as we rounded the corner and came face-to-face with a dozen Hathas, Drystan’s beefy foot soldiers, who stood over eight feet tall with arms the size of small trees. In the darkening twilight, their gray skin appeared spectral and made their black, razor-sharp tusks curling up from their bottom lips more menacing. With the way their tusks were formed, they always seemed to be growling, displaying rows of long, jagged teeth. When they saw us, they screeched and rushed toward us. The close confines of the alley made firing weapons unreliable at best. I unsheathed my long blade and attacked the brute nearest me.
    I swiped at its midsection before it could place its hands on me. A trail of intestines followed in the wake of my blade. I heard Nick off to my right engaged with one of the beasts as I moved on to the next. New screeches emitted from the other end of the alley, and I smiled. Luke and Ben were silencing Hathas, too. These bastards would never get close enough to crush us.
    The four of us dispatched all twelve Hathas while Quinten watched our backs for more