Daggermouth (The Heart, #1) — Chapter no 16

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

With What Army?

Jameson slipped through the eastern checkpoint silently, nodding to the sentry whose fingers never left the trigger of her rifle. The camp had already changed in the twenty-four hours he’d been away from it. More gaunt faces, more haunted eyes, more makeshift graves marking the perimeter.

Four new mounds of dirt.

The rage that bubbled in his chest was an old companion by now, familiar as the hunger that gnawed at everyone’s belly. He swallowed it back. Rage without direction was just noise, and tonight he needed clarity.

“Ghost.” The sentry’s voice was a whisper, her eyes reflecting the distant barrel fires. “Your lieutenants are waiting for you.”

Of course they were. Six hours of silence from him made them nervous— twenty-four probably had them preparing for war.

“Tell me what’s happened in the past day,” he said, as the rebel guard kept stride beside him.

The sentry’s jaw tightened. “Four more gone to hunger. Medicine reserves are completely depleted in the south quarter. And they’re saying the Heart’s cutting off the last of the food shipments.”

Jameson nodded once, absorbing the information without letting it show on his face. Leaders didn’t have the luxury of visible despair. “Get some rest, Talia.

You’ve been on watch duty for two days. You look like shit.”

She huffed a wet laugh. “Says the man with blood on his boots.”

He glanced down. Not his blood. Never his own, somehow. Always someone else’s sacrifice staining his path. This time a Cardinal rebel who had accidentally stepped in the way of a Veyra patrol vehicle. They hadn’t asked questions, didn’t even bother to stop when they shot him down for simply stepping into the road too early.

The mud sucked at Jameson’s boots with each step through the rebel camp, a wet resistance that felt like the Boundary itself was trying to hold him back from racing into the Heart and tearing it apart to find Shade. Twenty-four hours

down, forty-eight more to go.

Two days of hell.

The rebel camp sprawled before him. What had begun as a handful of disgruntled Boundary residents had grown into a force nearly a thousand strong.

They’d transformed the abandoned factory district into something resembling a military base, if military bases were built from salvage and determination.

His eyes watered as he squinted through the smoke from the barrel fires mixing with the acrid smell of burning plastic—whatever the rebels had found to keep warm tonight. The small fires cast long shadows across mud-packed pathways, the orange glow painting the rusted metal structures in false warmth.

Sentries stood at each strategic point, some armed with Heart rifles pilfered from dead guards, others with cruder weapons fashioned from scrap. Between the structures, tents fashioned from tarps and old billboards housed those who’d lost everything to the Heart’s brutality. He moved between them without needing to look, his feet knowing every incline, every drainage ditch from night after night of pacing every inch of this joyless refuge.

Jameson pushed further into the camp, acknowledging nods with slight inclines of his head. They parted for him without conscious thought, a sea of starving, hopeless people.

He was the Ghost to them. The smuggler who could slip between rings unseen. The man who’d given the rebellion a backbone.

He hated the reverence in their eyes. Hated even more that he hadn’t earned it.

Headquarters stood ahead against the smoggy sky—an abandoned administrative building that’d once processed the factory workers. Its windows were blown out, replaced with metal sheets that kept out rain but trapped heat.

The concrete walls were scarred with bullet holes from the last time the Veyra had ventured this deep into the Boundary.

Twenty-three dead that day. Twelve of them children.

Jameson paused at the entrance, letting the memory wash over him as his fingers brushed over one of the bullet’s scars. The screams. The blood. Shadera standing in the center of it all, knives flashing like extensions of her rage, taking down five Veyra officers before the rest retreated. He’d known then. Known as he watched her covered in the blood of revolution, eyes wild with protective fury, that she would become a symbol to the cause.

He just never imagined she would become it in captivity.

He pushed through the door, climbed the stairs that groaned under his weight, and entered what had once been an overseer’s office. Maps covered every surface—the Heart’s layout and distribution centers, Cardinal and Boundary rebel camps, the underground tunnels that connected them all. Reports stacked in careful piles, each one detailing food shortages, medical needs, weapons inventory. The rebellion’s nervous system.

Jameson sank into the chair behind the desk, his body suddenly leaden. Days without sleep caught up with him in a rush, blurring the edges of his vision. He rubbed his eyes, the grit beneath his lids feeling like ground glass.

The door opened without a knock. Lieutenant Rook entered first, followed by Sergeant Samuels, both pairs of eyes narrowing on him with worry.

“Where the fuck have you been?” Rook scolded, her fingers wrapping around the edge of her tactical vest. She tilted her shaved head as she waited for an answer, making the burn scars that crawled up her neck and over the side of her face catch the shadows.

Jameson leaned back, a smile ghosting across his lips. “Charming, Rook. It’s why I keep you around.”

“You keep me around because I’m the best sniper you have ever seen.” She didn’t smile back. “Where were you, Ghost? The camp was getting worried.”

“Jaeger’s place and other camps.” Jameson kept his voice light to mask the fear. “Learning exactly how fucked we might be.”

Samuels took the seat across from him, pulling his gun from his back and resting it between his legs. Samuels was shorter than Rook, stockier with the kind of dense muscle that came from hauling bodies.

“You’ve heard about the prison massacre then? The singing?” Samuels asked.

Jameson nodded.

“Well, the singing has spread,” Samuels started again. “Every quarter of the Boundary will know the anthem soon. They’re singing it in the streets at night.”

“Do they know it was Shade? Know that it was her they were singing for?”

The words caught in Jameson’s throat.

“No,” Rook answered. “They don’t know a name. But they know it was a Daggermouth, a woman who tried to kill the Executioner. They know she stood with the prisoners and tried to stop it, from the information that’s leaked into the Boundary already.”

Jameson closed his eyes briefly, resting his head on the back of his chair as he blew out a heavy breath toward the ceiling.

“She’s gonna hate that,” Samuels said with mild amusement. “If she makes it out of the Heart she’s not going to be happy to find herself the face of a rebellion.”

“Not if, when,” Jameson corrected as he dragged his eyes back to the

commanders in front of him.

Rook and Samuels exchanged a glance.

Jameson knew what they were thinking, knew the Heart never let anyone go.

Especially not the woman who’d tried to kill the heir. They knew as well as he did, that if they had not publicly executed her by now, the statement they planned to make with her was much larger than inciting fear. The silence lingering between the three of them was heavy, and he let it stretch, watching his commanders doubt him.

Rook broke it first. “Some of the younger rebels are talking about marching on the Heart.”

“With what army?” Jameson’s voice was sharp. “With what weapons? Shut down all talk of that from them immediately—we cannot have any rebels going rogue.”

“They’re desperate,” Rook said. “The food situation…” She stopped, jaw working.

“The food situation is critical,” Samuels finished for her. “We’ve got maybe a week of rations left for the camp, and that’s with cutting portions again. The Cardinal’s started refusing our credits. Word is the Heart put pressure on them.

No trade or selling with the Boundary or they’ll cut the Cardinal’s shipments too.”

“They’re starving us out.” Rook’s voice had gone flat. “No need to waste bullets when hunger will do the job for them.”

Jameson stood abruptly, moving to the wall where the most detailed map of the city hung. His fingers traced the concentric circles—Heart at the center, Cardinal surrounding it, Boundary at the edges, bleeding into the wastelands.

Neat divisions that determined who lived and who died based on nothing but location.

“We have other options,” he said finally. “My contact in the Heart went silent after Shadera’s capture, like most Heart informants, but I’ve got a lead on reconnecting.”

“The one smuggling medicine on Veyra vehicles?” Rook asked.

Jameson nodded. “They’ve been reliable for months. If I can reestablish contact, I’m going to try to expand the operation. Not just medicine anymore.

Food. Weapons.”

“Risky,” Samuels observed. “Medicine is one thing. Small packages, low weight. Food is bulky. Harder to hide, harder to move. And weapons? That’s execution on sight, no questions asked.”

“Got a better idea?” Jameson turned back to them. “Because I’m all ears.

Otherwise, we work with what we have.”

Neither answered. There were no better options. Just varying degrees of desperation. Outside, someone coughed—the rattling kind that meant infection, that meant one more name on the list of people they couldn’t save.

“There’s something else.” Jameson hesitated, the words like lead on his tongue. “The Veyra had drones following me yesterday, that’s why I didn’t come back here till now to be safe.”

“Shit.” Rook straightened. “You think they know about the camp?”

“If they did, we’d already be dead.” Jameson ran a hand through his silver hair. “But they’re looking harder than before. They were surveillance class, but they’ve been upgraded. They can fit in small, confined spaces now, can see through dense structures. They have heat-tracking, facial recognition, mapping

systems. They followed me halfway to the north checkpoint before I shot them down.”

“What are they mapping?” Samuels leaned forward.

“From what I could gather off the chips I salvaged, population density.

Structural weak points. The kind of intel you gather before…” Jameson’s throat went dry.

“Before you level everything,” Rook finished, her scarred face going pale.

Jameson nodded. “The Heart is preparing for something, something big.”

“War?” Samuels asked.

“Or its aftermath. It wouldn’t be war for us, it would be systematic euthanasia. It would be mass murder.” Jameson turned back to the map, his eyes tracing the boundary between their district and the toxic wasteland beyond. “I want the bomb shelters prepared. All of them. The ones from before the partition still have their lead lining. Priority for children and medical staff.”

Rook’s sharp intake of breath was the only sound in the room. The bomb shelters were a relic of the time before New Found Haven, concrete bunkers buried deep enough to survive whatever had destroyed the old world. They’d been maintaining them as a last resort, a final sanctuary if the Heart ever decided the Boundary was more trouble than it was worth.

“You think they’d actually do it?” Rook asked quietly. “Sacrifice an entire ring?”

“I think Maximus Serel has never let human life stand in the way of control.”

Jameson’s voice had gone cold. “And I think we need to be ready for anything.”

Rook nodded once, already calculating logistics in her head. “I’ll get teams working on the shelters. Water, filters, whatever medical supplies we can spare.”

“We can’t spare any,” Samuels interjected.

“We’ll make it work.” Rook’s tone left no room for argument. “What else?”

“Double the patrols along the northern edge. If they come on foot or in vehicles, that’s where they’ll hit first.” Jameson pointed to the map. “And I want a meeting with the Cardinal rebel leaders. I want to speak with Farrow about the credit situation. If food stops flowing from the Heart completely, we need to know immediately.”

They continued for another hour, working through contingencies, allocating their dwindling resources. As they spoke, Jameson felt the weight settling heavier on his shoulders. So many lives depending on him making the right calls. So many ways to fail them.

Rook and Samuels finally moved to the door, readying to carry out orders when Jameson stopped them.

“There is one more thing.” He paused, tapping his knuckle on the desk’s scarred surface. They would not like this. “In two days, I will be going into the Heart with Jaeger and his men to get Shade out.”

“You can’t,” Rook blurted, her eyebrows creasing as she shook her head. “We need you here, Ghost. We can’t risk losing you. Let the Daggermouths take care of their people. You need to take care of yours.”

Jameson stared at her for a long moment, letting her words settle—the divide in them. Their people. Her words held no malicious intent, but they scratched at his mind wrong. “There is no them or us. Not here, not in the Boundary,” he started, his voice stern. “It doesn’t matter if you choose to call yourself a rebel or a Daggermouth, the reality of our situation doesn’t change. We all want the same thing, to live.”

“Jay…” Samuels started, but Jameson held up his hand to stop him.

“I’m not asking permission. We need her—I… I need her home. I will not abandon her, just like I wouldn’t abandon you. I have to at least try. I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t try.”

The room stayed silent as they both stared back at him, their concerned expressions softening into understanding.

“If, for some reason, I do not come back—Rook, you will take my place until the rebels elect a new leader. But believe me, I have no intention of dying in the Heart.”

He watched as the possibility of that responsibility settled on Rook’s shoulders, watched her throat work, her eyes dart to Samuels before she gave one curt nod. They filed out of the room silently, shutting the door behind them as Jameson’s hands splayed out on the desk.

He leaned his weight onto them, letting his head hang for only a moment before blowing out a long breath and straightening. His hand scrubbed down

his face as he moved to the window, pushing aside the metal sheet with the other to look out over the camp.

Fires burned lower now, the night growing colder. Shadows moved between structures—guards changing shifts, medics making rounds, parents walking crying children who couldn’t sleep from hunger.

His fingers found the deep scar that ran from collarbone to rib cage, tracing its familiar path over the tattered fabric of his shirt. His first lesson in Heart savagery, delivered by a Veyra officer who’d caught him stealing medicine for his dying sister. The officer had smiled while cutting him, explaining the anatomy lesson as blood soaked through Jameson’s shirt. His sister had died anyway, the medicine he’d finally stolen arriving too late.

The memory lingered in the front of his mind, often resurfacing even fifteen years later. The image of her perfectly still on her cot when he entered their makeshift home with the antibiotics, the coldness of her skin when he had tried to wake her. He’d stayed with her for days, holding her lifeless hand, tears streaming down his face as the last of his family left him alone in this city.

He had chosen then to become a smuggler, swore it to her. He couldn’t save her, but he could save others. At the very least, he would try.

Jameson closed his eyes, listening to the distant sound of someone singing, voice cracking with emotion over the words of that anthem but never faltering.

He let the sounds wash over him, let himself feel the fear he couldn’t show the others. Let himself feel the absence of her.

He would find her. Or she would find her way back to him. Those were the only possibilities he would allow himself to consider. Anything else was unthinkable.

The song outside grew louder as more voices joined in, a ragged chorus of defiance floating over the Boundary like a prayer. Or maybe, it was a promise.