I was a step away from the sidewalk when I heard the crack of the rifle. The bullet hit less than a second later, splattering the gravel in front of me as it blew out of my sternum. It didn’t knock me over, but I still felt the hit, like somebody had just driven a javelin right through my chest.
A little spurt of blood followed, then another, with each beat of my heart. Someone had shot me right through it, I realized, as the ground came rushing up to me. I hit, hard, and had enough consciousness left to realize that I’d just been ambushed before the darkness started to close in around me, taking me into its cold, unforgiving embrace.
30.
In the dimness around me, I could feel my heart laboring to pump; I was pretty sure a lot of its musculature had been blown out of my chest by the rifle shot. I was curled on the ground in the fetal position, wishing I could just hug my knees to me and make the pain stop, to get the fading light to just go out. It was cold, so cold, and I didn’t have a jacket, and that seemed so important as the darkness crawled in at the corners of my vision.
Sienna, hang on, Wolfe said, sounding more urgent than I could recall hearing him in some time.
Sienna, stay awake! Zack yelled, the voice in my head so loud it caused my hair to tickle down to my scalp, to stand on its ends. You’re under attack.
Another shot echoed through the night and hit me in the back, lower right hand side. My kidney exploded and I gasped in pain, writhing. There was no cover nearby, and I hurt so much I couldn’t think straight.
We must move her, Gavrikov said, and I lifted off the ground. My body was so overwhelmed with pain that it was shutting down my mind, but not the minds that were with me. They’d taken control of me before, back when I was weaker, but not of late. I floated through the air, not gently, and crashed behind a fence, almost slamming into a telephone pole. I came to rest in a thick patch of damp grass that felt like little frozen ice crystals brushing my cheek.
I cannot move her any farther, Gavrikov said, sounding exhausted. I am fighting her body, and it is too much.
Hang on, Wolfe grunted. I’m fighting her body, too, but it’s healing … slowly.
Shot through the heart, Eve said, almost sadly. Is this how it’s to end, then?
“No,” I whispered, then clenched my teeth together. I tightened my chest muscles, and a line of blood slopped down my front, thinner than it had been a moment ago. My back was pure agony where the second shot had landed, and I looked down. My shirt was slick and dark in the thin light of the lamp atop the telephone pole.
“Get to her!” someone shouted in the distance. It was a woman’s voice. “Before she heals!”
“You got her in the heart,” came another voice, this one a man’s. They were both familiar. “She’s not healing from that.”
“You don’t know that,” the woman said. “We aren’t familiar enough with whatever meta gave her that power to make the call.”
“Fine, have it your way,” he said. “She flew low, barely off the ground, looking half dead.” He paused, and when he spoke again, he sounded downright gleeful. “Police are already on the way, probably, right? Or do you think a couple gunshots could go unnoticed in this part of Bloomington?”
The woman’s voice was drawing closer. “The cops are probably on their way. Why?”
“No reason.” I heard a click, and then a light grunt, and something landed a few feet away from me, thumping on the dirt. I lifted my dazed head.
GRENADE! Bastian shouted in my mind, and I didn’t have time to react before it went off.
It wasn’t all fire like in the movies. It made a loud popping noise, and I felt about a thousand massive pinpricks of pain as the shrapnel tore through me. It hit the bottom of my feet, got me in the forehead and cheeks, my shoulders. The blast wasn’t world-ending, but it damned sure felt like it, rolling me over and causing my head to ring like the Liberty Bell.
Or not, since no one rings the Liberty Bell anymore.
I opened an eye and saw another little object thump down next to me, much closer this time. I raised a shaking, bloody hand, helplessly.
Nein! Eve Kappler shouted, and three flashes of light burst out of my palm, wrapping the grenade tightly, making it look like a miniature sun in the midst of multiple nets. With a poof! the nets burst, collapsing in on themselves and fading. When the glow disappeared, the grenade fell in on itself, the explosives spent and the shrapnel contained.
“What the hell?” came the man’s voice. “Dud?”
“Or she somehow stopped it,” the woman said, a whole lot more cautious than he was.
Ten seconds, Wolfe warned. Pushing the metal fragments out now.
I looked at my hand, and sure enough, there was a tiny sliver of metal emerging from my skin like it was being born from my flesh. One dropped out of my forehead like a shadowy, miniature suicide jumper plummeting out of my skull. My kidney felt better, my heart didn’t hurt like death anymore; I was down to a mild ache in my chest and the thousand angry hornet stings around my body from the grenade shrapnel felt like nothing worse than needle pricks. I still felt like Hellraiser, but I sat up, blood and dew brushing off in the grass, leaving a bed of dark stains in the dirt.
I need to move, I said, and Gavrikov obliged. Whisper quiet, I surged further into the darkness of the grassy area between the bar’s parking lot and the business next door. I swooped around the corner of the fence, and out of sight before my attackers could turn the corner and catch sight of me.
Behind the bar, the fence wrapped the building, wood and impenetrable. That was fine; it gave me cover as I came around it at a hundred miles an hour. I looped the building quick, figuring I’d get the drop on whoever had attacked me, make them pay for not finishing the job.
The only thing I was undecided on was how badly I’d make them pay.
Death, Wolfe whispered.
There can be only one sentence for this crime, Bjorn agreed.
The government is not going to protect you, Bastian said. They’ve as good as declared open season on you. Maybe it’s time to let everybody know that open season on Sienna Nealon means open season FOR Sienna Nealon.
If they will not protect you with the rule of their law, why adhere to their law? Gavrikov asked.
No one in this city is looking out for you, Eve said. No one here will stop them from killing you. It’s not their job. And even the ones who don’t want them to kill you aren’t going to interfere.
Zack? I asked as I came around the back of the bar. Two dark shapes were moving in the night, creeping around the fence where I’d gone, taking their time. One of them was most definitely female, and she was holding a big rifle. Looked like an M-14, complete with a nice scope.
I don’t know. Zack sounded torn. They’re right, no one’s going to protect you but you … but …
But what? I asked, hovering, just at the corner, waiting. I was so torn up, so empty inside, so wounded … I didn’t trust my own judgment. My instincts were to torch them from a distance, burn both of them alive by heating their blood to five thousand degrees and just letting them cook here in the parking lot, two less killers in the world to worry about.
Killing them and embracing the image of you that they’re putting out there … it feels like giving up, he said. Like giving in and saying, Yep, Sienna Nealon is the murderer you all think she was. He was quiet when next he spoke. You’re not a quitter, Sienna. And yeah, it’s bad right now. I can’t promise it’s going to get better anytime soon, but … if you do this … I can promise it will never get better. Never.
I unclenched my fist. They don’t want me to even defend myself. They don’t respect me. They want me to lie down and die. They’ll hate me until I’m a victim, and maybe even then.
I know, Zack said. It’s unfair.
It’s bullshit! Gavrikov said. It should be the sovereign right of every person to fight back if someone means to kill them.
What message does this send? Eve asked. That we should lie down and die for our atta
ckers?
That we should measure our response, Zack said.
Try measuring a response in a life or death situation, Wolfe said. It’s the quickest way to die.
In a fight, Bastian said, you take your enemies out. I don’t care who you are. She didn’t go looking for this, but you can’t expect her to just sit there and dilly while people are shooting her through the heart. That’s insane.
But she’s still alive now, Zack said. She doesn’t have to kill them. Not here. Not now. She can take them out, no problem, without killing them.
Fine, this time, Eve said. But she has already taken them out, shown them mercy once. How many times must she turn her back on them before they kill her? Because they very nearly did this time.
I don’t know, Zack said.
What if they get out again? Bjorn asked. They were turned loose once, what’s to stop it happening once more? And next time they finish the job, for they will never underestimate her again.
I don’t have an answer for that, Zack said.
No, you have an answer, Eve snarled, and your answer seems to be mercy, mercy unto her death.
This affects me, too, you know, Zack said.
No, it doesn’t, Eve said. It doesn’t affect any of us, really. We’re passengers. When she hurts, we don’t really feel it. If she dies, our consciousness get snuffed out for the final time, this hollow remnant of our existence swept off the mortal coil, but it’s her who will die, you idiot. You have no skin in the game, no flesh on the line. You are like one of those politicians making their calculation at a distance, consoling yourself by saying, “You have to break a few eggs to make an omelet,” while overlooking that it’s not your eggs that are being broken, and the peoples’ whose it is aren’t getting the damned omelet. I could almost feel her passionate intensity as she turned her attention on me. Sienna, there is no love lost between us, but Ariadne loves you as she would a daughter. Your life is on the line, and these people, the moment they got out of prison with a fresh start, threw it away to hunt and kill you. They will not stop. They will not be gently rehabilitated. They will kill you if they can, and this soft-minded idiot would give them every opportunity. Do not be a fool. End them now.
“I don’t think I can do that,” I whispered.
Then be it on your head, Eve said, when their next shot hits you in the brain. I won’t shed any tears, though I hurt for the one who will. And she disappeared into the recesses of my mind.
“I need help,” I said, lingering behind the corner of the fence. “Non-lethal.”
Let us break their minds, Bjorn said.
You’re with me? I asked.
I could almost see Bjorn grin in the dark, like a Cheshire cat’s teeth showing in the corner of my vision. I would not back from a fight.
I stand with you, Gavrikov said. Foolhardy though this decision is, I suppose it is admirable.
You choose odd ground on which to make your moral stand, Wolfe said. Didn’t you drown a woman in her own vault just a few months ago?
That was different, I said. Others were at risk, there was no recourse. These people … we can take them down. They will go to jail. And if they don’t …
They will, Zack said. You can’t kill them … but Scott didn’t say you had to lie down and die. Just fight back, subdue them. They’ll be back in the Cube, and this time they’ll stay there.
“Let’s do this,” I said, and swept toward them.
I flew across the parking lot, low over a parked car, and when I was twenty feet away, I said, Bjorn, now.
The woman screamed and dropped her rifle, the heavy stock rattling hard against the parking lot pavement as it dropped. It fired into the air, sending a shot off, and I came down on her, kicking her through the fence. It shattered rotted planks and she kept going, slamming into the side of the building next door.
The man peeked his face around the corner of the busted fence, and his teeth glinted in the light of the lamp post. “Shafer,” I muttered and leapt toward him. He was an Iron Tooth, and that meant his mouth was pretty much invulnerable to conventional punching, so I went low and hit him right in the sternum instead.
Bones cracked, and he gasped, air leaving him. I pounded his ribs a few times with each of my fists, breaking my own hands and letting them knit back in the process. Keep it up, Wolfe.
Can we—
“No,” I said, and hit Shafer so hard that he started to go airborne as well. I grabbed his belt and yanked on it, ripping it free and depriving him of the two grenades he still had on it, as well as his pistol. I tossed them back toward Borosky’s—his girlfriend’s—rifle, and heard it all clank as it hit the pavement in the parking lot.
I zoomed over to them as Borosky was starting to get up and dealt her a punch to the face that knocked her cold. Her eyes rolled back in her head and she went slack. Police sirens wailed in the distance, and Shafer was just getting to his feet, clutching his ribs, when I heard one turn onto the street.
I didn’t have much time, so I rocketed over to him, grabbed him by the forehead, and said, “Night night.” I rammed his skull into the asphalt, shattering pavement and causing his eyelids to flutter and close.
“Take that,” I said weakly, not feeling much of anything but tired. I was a bloody and tattered mess, but I’d beaten them. Beaten them and their backstabbing sneak attack. “You bastards. I’m not quitting. I’m not going down that easy … Harmon.” I said it even though he wasn’t there, wasn’t listening. It was almost like a prayer, like I hoped he could hear me.
Like I hoped he would know I wasn’t going to make it easy on him.
I stood over both of them, Borosky and Shafer, hands in the air. I figured I’d make it easy on the cops, though, and I did, just standing there, in surrender to the law, waiting for the police to pull in and sort this whole mess out.
31.
“I want to press charges,” I said for the hundredth time. Lights were flashing all around me, again, and I was tired of this scene. Tired of being surrounded by cops, by fire trucks, by ambulances. I wanted to go home but I didn’t have a home anymore. I wanted to be anywhere but here, yet I was stuck here, watching over Borosky and Shafer while the Bloomington PD administered the suppressant drugs that had made their way into usage among every major police department in America.
“Yes, ma’am,” an officer named Gustafson said. He was a pretty cool dude, and by cool I mean unflappable. His lips had been a straight line the entire time I’d known him—about half an hour now—that told me he was neither impressed with me nor that excited to be in my presence. It could have been worse, though; at least he was being professional about it, and he wasn’t actively running away from me.
“Sorry,” I said, apologizing reflexively. Shafer wasn’t awake, but Borosky had regained consciousness and was blinking heavily, almost as if someone had concussed her. Hmm. “Can I take a second and talk to her?”
Gustafson cocked an eyebrow at me. “You want to talk to the woman you’re pressing assault charges against?”
“Just a question,” I said. “She and her boytoy are probably the dozenth people to come after me in the last two days. I have a feeling this is all coming from somewhere, and I just want to mention a name to her, see if she reacts.”
Gustafson looked over his shoulder at where another cop was trying to get Borosky up off the curb where they’d cuffed her. “I don’t think she’s going to be much good at answering anything right now.”
“Can I try? Pretty please?”
“Since you asked so nice,” Gustafson said, looking completely unimpressed. He beckoned me forward and followed as I walked over to her. Borosky never once made eye contact with me, her head bobbing like she’d suffered serious neurological damage. She was a meta, so it would probably heal. Probably.
“Rosanna?” I asked, and she blinked and bobbed her head while lifting it up to look at me. “Where’s Cassidy?”
Borosky blinked at me, trying to concentrate. “Huh?”
; “Where’s Cassidy Ellis?” I asked. “The woman who hired you?”
“I don’t … are you Cassidy?” Borosky looked at me blankly.
“I don’t think she knows who you’re talking about,” Gustafson said. Astute guy. He was either right, and she was clueless, or she was the world’s best liar. I was prepared to accept a third option, though—I’d dinged her brain so hard that she’d honestly forgotten who Cassidy was and why she’d sent her here.
“Guess not,” I said, stuffing my hands in my jeans pockets. They squished, because my pockets were filled with blood that had yet to dry. Cold blood that had dripped down from all my various wounds. I yanked my hands out of my pockets, once more covered in red streaks. The sad thing was, I’d done this about five times now.
“Who’s this Cassidy person?” Gustafson asked. Dude still looked like he either didn’t know where he was or just didn’t care.
“Another of the Cube detainees that got out a few days ago,” I said. “We called her the Brain, because she had beyond-genius-level-IQ. Dumb as a post when it came to figuring out human nature, though.”
“Got a captain like that,” Gustafson grunted.
I turned back to Borosky. “Hey, Rosanna,” and she bobbed her head, trying to focus on me, “how’d you find me?”
Borosky stared at me, still bobbing, unable to keep her eyes locked on me. I was about to write her off as a hopeless case when she burbled, “Tracked your cell phone.”
I blinked. I damned sure hadn’t expected a truthful answer. I pulled it out of my pocket and stared at the little lump of plastic and metal. Suddenly it made sense why she and Shafer had bushwhacked me outside a bar where I’d stopped on a whim, without telling a soul I was going to do it. “How’d you know how to do that?” I asked.
She stared at me, as best she could with the bobbing head that she couldn’t hold up straight. “We’re assassins, duh. Finding the people we want to kill is what we do.”
Prisoners (Out of the Box Book 10) Page 16