Someone had forced it open from within, creating the gap that the force outside had been waiting for, and through that gap soldiers were pouring with the committed momentum of people who had been held at a distance for six days and had been given exactly what they needed to end that.
The fortress's interior became a different kind of fight.
Close, with no organized defense, the soldiers who had held the walls for six days dying in the spaces between buildings they'd been living in, in the corridors between structures that had become familiar enough to navigate in darkness.
They fought with the energy reserves they had left, which were the reserves of people six days into starvation under sustained assault, and those reserves ran out in bodies before they ran out in will.
Jake moved through it and could do nothing.
