Chapter 17: What Bleeds, Runs
Apollo numbly wiped his hands, then Thorin’s shoulder, then the table, but the blood kept coming, no matter where he looked.
He fought the urge to retch, focusing instead on the line in the grain of the table, the flick of Lyra’s hands as she scrubbed down surfaces with salt and water and a stain of blue that would not come out, no matter how she tried.
By the time the room was clean enough to fake innocence, Thorin had levered himself upright, cradling his arm as if it were a new, sullen animal.
The wound seemed to be clotting; Apollo would check it again at dusk, if they lasted that long.
Nik had dragged Cassian’s body to the rear, swaddled in a tarp and wedged behind a pile of kiln bricks.
The others, Lyra’s blue-tumor corpse, the two crossbowmen, heaved out the back and into the sopping salt marsh, where they would feed the rats and the crows.
Lyra stripped off her shirt, ragged now and dyed from blood to a bruised purple.
She changed into a new one without shame, then found a bottle of something clear and bitter at the bench. She poured three shots, Apollo, Nik, and herself.
None for Thorin, who shook his head, already hating the taste of the healing spirits Apollo would be pouring into him next.
"There’s no time," Lyra said, voice low, barely above the hiss of wind against the patched glass. "Cassian came too quick. There’s a leak."
Nik leaned back, arms slung over the bench, as if the violence had been a kind of massage.