Gwen didn't answer him. The words that a queen, a sovereign, or a tactician should have spoken to stabilize the collapsing northern front simply died before they could reach her lips. She walked toward him instead, her heavy leather riding boots striking the cold stone floor plates with a slow, deliberate cadence that sounded abnormally loud in the sudden, claustrophobic isolation of the tactics room.
The fierce, unyielding survival instinct that had kept her spine completely rigid on the windy parapet—the sheer force of will that had allowed her to look down at an army of her petrified subjects without collapsing—seemed to systematically dissolve the moment the thick iron door had clicked shut behind them. In its place, the quiet, windowless privacy of the bunker left her entirely unshielded, exposed to a raw, electric current of pure adrenaline, psychological shock, and the high-tension exhaustion of an ongoing apocalypse.
