Chapter 24: Hold Tight
Chapter 24: Hold Tight
I have no useful description of the next four minutes. Everything hurt. Her armour edges dug into my thighs, my ribs screamed with every stride, and I had my forearms locked across her collarbone and my face turned sideways against her neck because it was the only way to keep my head from snapping around. Eastbridge went past in strips — the stores, the black gap behind the mess hall, a long silent sprint down the eastern service lane with the floodlight arc sliding by two metres to our left.
She was hurt too. I could feel it: the hitch on the left where the hip was strapped, the change in her breathing on the straights. She slowed twice, both times for cover, both times without being asked. She never once slowed for herself.
Then she stopped dead behind a stack of drainage pipe, dropped into a crouch, and I lifted my head.
The flood-channel post sat sixty metres ahead under one working lamp. The wall. The coils of wire. The steel gate.
And three guards.
"I’m sorry," I whispered. My mouth was so dry the words barely worked. "There were only two. Every other time — every single night I watched it, there were two—"
"Be quiet."
It wasn’t unkind. It was the flat absolute quiet of somebody doing something more important than my feelings, and she didn’t look back at me when she said it. No blame arrived. I got the impression blame simply wasn’t a category she used on a battlefield; things were as they were, and then you dealt with them.
She looked for perhaps six seconds. Then she stood, walked three paces sideways, lifted the lid of a steel refuse container against the wall of the pump house, and dropped me into it.
I did not have time to object. I landed on something soft and wet that I chose not to identify, and the lid came down to a hand’s width, and her face appeared in the gap.
A warning. One word of warning would have cost her nothing.
"Stay. Do not come out until I return for you."
Then she was gone from the gap, and I put my eye to it, and I understood that I had never in my life watched someone prepare to kill.
She took cover against the side of the container and read the ground for a while. I couldn’t hear her thinking, but I could see the shape of it in where her eyes went: up the wall, along the coiled wire, back down to the gate, out to the black cut of the channel, back to the gate again.
I knew what she was finding, because I’d been finding it for three days. That wall was four metres of container and concrete with wire on top that would open a man to the bone. She could get over it. Injured, restricted, carrying a lifetime of technique in a body that couldn’t fully express it—she could probably still get over it alone.
She could not get me over it. Not without opening the gate.
And she never once looked at that wall like it was an option that ended with me in a bin. I watched for it. I’d have understood it. It simply wasn’t there.
Aria drew her sword.
She didn’t rip it out. She pulled it free across maybe four full seconds, slow enough that the steel never rang, and then she started walking with a footwork I’d never seen anything like — heel placed before toe, weight rolling forward along the outside edge, every step landing in the deepest shadow available as though the shadows had been marked out for her in advance.
She got to five metres before the nearest guard saw her.
"Contact!"
Three rifles came up at once. Three black barrels in the lamplight, and the flat mechanical clack of safeties coming off.
Aria stopped. She looked at the rifles the way you’d look at a badly built fence.
"These are extremely ugly," she murmured.
"Drop the sword! Drop it! On your knees — hands out—"
"On your KNEES!"
And she began to comply.
That’s what it looked like. Her sword arm dropped slowly toward the ground. Her knees started to bend, and every part of the motion moved her forward—her leading foot came down half a metre closer under the pretence of bracing, her shoulders turning under the pretence of yielding. They were watching for resistance. What they saw was a wounded woman beginning to kneel.
At four metres, she moved.
I can’t describe it properly. She wasn’t there and then she was among them. Red fire ran up the blade from the guard to the tip, thin and bright, and one flat sweep went through the throat of the first man and continued through the second — through his neck and through the rifle he was in the act of raising, which came apart in two pieces and dropped.
Both of them went down in the same second.
I had my eye at the gap in the lid and my heart trying to climb out of my throat. My first feeling was relief. Pure and total.
We’re getting out.
My second feeling arrived about half a second later and was much worse.
She just killed two people.
Not monsters. Not Ash Rats or a Lurker or something with too many joints. Two men with faces, going down with exactly the economy Liora had used on things that spat ash, and no more hesitation in it than that.
I don’t know what I expected to feel. What I actually felt was that I should have been paralysed, and I wasn’t.
They were armed. They had rifles pointed at a woman who had asked them for nothing. They stood at a gate whose entire purpose was to keep nine hundred people inside a ledger, and one of them had been about to fire. Before the Merge, the sight would have put me on the floor. Tonight it went through me and out the other side and left something colder behind. I noticed the change while it was happening, and there was no time at all to have an opinion about it.
Because the third guard was still standing.
He’d been further back, near the gate housing, the only one of them with distance. Aria was already closing on him. Four metres. Three. The blade coming round.
He fired.
She had been told the weapons were fast, but being told was not the same as seeing one fire. She began her evasion the moment his finger moved. Against a spear or crossbow, it would have been early enough. Against a rifle, it was not remotely early enough. Her restricted Level 4 body could not deliver the speed her instincts demanded.
The shot went through her left shoulder at about two metres.
Her armour didn’t stop it. She rocked back half a step. A fine dark spray went out behind her and hung in the lamplight, and I nearly screamed — got my own hand over my mouth in time, and bit down, and tasted blood.
She didn’t fall. She got her feet under her and stayed up with the sword still in her right hand.
Something changed in the guard’s posture. He’d hit her, and she hadn’t gone down, and now he was frightened. He braced the rifle into his shoulder and I saw his hand move on the selector.
"It fires again!" I shouted it before I knew I was going to. "It doesn’t stop — it keeps going—"
"I remember," Aria said.
I came out of the bin.
It was the single stupidest thing I had ever done. I had been given a direct order, and I disobeyed it anyway. The lid banged. I got over the lip, landed badly on the concrete, and came up with the cloth-wrapped kitchen knife in my hand—twelve centimetres of supermarket steel, held by a man with Strength 5, several metres from a soldier with an automatic weapon.
I knew I couldn’t reach him. I knew it with total clarity while I was already running.
I was not going to sit in a bin while she died doing me a favour.
The rifle opened up.
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