Chapter 35

  Rebecca Carter

  Rebecca Carter burned with a cold, undirected fury as she followed the bouncing ball. She tried to put the image of her brother dying from her mind, to focus on the task at hand. But it was a fresh kind of pain—to be reunited with one whose death she had come to terms with, only to have him taken away again just when she had begun to accept the miracle.

  She couldn’t even tell with whom, precisely, she was furious. Nick, for staying in hiding so long, allowing his daughter to live without a father and his sister without a brother? The madness of October Industries, which had killed him? Or she, Rebecca, on whose watch he had died? The only person involved she could find no anger toward was at her six.

  She would have shot down anyone who stood in her path, but none did. She and Alan descended several flights of stairs in silence and proceeded down a long, white hallway. Underground, this place seemed more or less clear of the mist.

  The ball couldn’t open doors, so Rebecca had to assist. This time, as the ball approached the white double doors at the termination of the hallway ahead, the doors opened themselves. They slid aside to reveal a brightly lit room beyond, occupied by two individuals standing face to face amidst a mess of wires and machinery. Rebecca had her weapon trained on them before she even registered their appearance, and she sensed Alan do the same right behind her. He moved to her left, and he didn’t have to say that this meant he was targeting the figure on the left, the woman. Rebecca trained her sights on the man. He wore a fine suit and sunglasses, although they were several stories underground. Unarmed. He shifted to look at them with mild curiosity.

  The other was a black woman, heavily tattooed, many rings on her fingers, orange and gray October Industries coat draped over a muscular physique. She wore a tight, dark jumpsuit, and also appeared to be unarmed. She grinned at them when she saw their wary approach, displaying several prominent gaps in her teeth.

  “I’ve seen her,” Alan said under his breath. “In Chicago.”

  Rebecca’s grip tightened on her revolver.

  “And that must be Shade,” Alan continued. “Nick said we could cut him a deal. Maybe—”

  “Y’know,” said the woman, “it’s rude to talk about people in front of them.” Her voice was rough and smug. Rebecca’s anger focused itself on this person immediately. She was in Chicago? That meant she was there when Kaitlyn died.

  “Could you wait a moment?” said the man, his voice smooth and calm. “We are in the middle of a business arrangement.”

  The woman snapped her fingers in realization. The sound was loud; Rebecca’s finger tightened to within a hair’s pressure of firing. “It took me a minute,” she said. “You’re Carter and Sheppard.” She focused on Rebecca. “You’re his sister. How is he? I’d love to—”

  Alan began to say something, maybe with the intention of calming Rebecca down, trying to talk it out with these unarmed individuals. But whatever he had begun to say came too late.

  Rebecca fired. She had fired for the stomach, because she still had some questions, and her aim was true. The woman’s hands snapped to her abdomen as she spun away onto the ground.

  “Becky…” said Alan through gritted teeth. Being called that pleased Rebecca, though his tone was one of exasperation.

  The man in the fine suit slunk back, hands up to show he meant no harm, as Rebecca and Alan approached the fallen woman. Parts, wires, and exposed circuitry gleamed around Rebecca under the harsh fluorescents.

  The woman rose to her knees and coughed, facing away from them. “Y’know, it’s funny. You never asked my name,” she said. She didn’t sound like someone who’d just been shot in the gut. She sounded like she was still smiling.

  Something clinked across the white stone floor toward Rebecca. A bullet, bloodless.

  “Jordan Dae,” said the woman.

  Her kick swept Rebecca’s legs from under her, and a blur of movement wrenched the gun violently from her hands. Something struck her in the chest like a sledgehammer and threw her onto the floor.

  Rebecca rolled to her feet in time to see Alan tossed to the ground, his shotgun now in Jordan’s possession. She raised the shotgun overhead and brought it down over her knee. The barrel bent to forty-five degrees. She tossed the weapon aside, then caught Rebecca’s revolver out of the air as it fell from above. With two hands, she bent that weapon too before dropping it at her feet alongside the ruined shotgun. The whole time, she never stopped giving them her gap-toothed smile.

  Shit, thought Rebecca. I can’t die here.

  Alan must have had the same thought. “She caught it,” he shouted as he leapt to his feet and charged Jordan Dae.

  This puzzled Rebecca, and for the first few seconds of Alan’s re-engagement, Rebecca tried to work out what he had meant. ‘She caught it?’ Of course Jordan had caught the revolver, but that act in itself hadn’t been impressive. Bending a revolver in half with your bare hands—now that was impressive.

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  Then she realized he meant the bullet. She’d caught the bullet. Did that mean that firearms were useless? Should she try the knife?

  Alan was strong, fit, highly trained, with a lifetime of experience. He had a considerable size advantage over the middling Jordan Dae. But in their hand-to-hand scuffle, she made him look like an MMA-club casual going up against a pro. She was uncannily quick, slipping out of every grab and hold Alan tried to pin her down with. She shrugged off the few blows that he landed as if they were nothing, but each of her strikes staggered him. And the whole time she beat up Alan Sheppard, she looked like she was enjoying it. Rebecca hesitated to enter the fray. She would only get in his way.

  The initial bought ended with an open-palm strike to the shoulder that sent Alan tumbling to the ground with a grunt of pain. Jordan danced back and forth on her feet like a boxer, grinning, ready for more. Alan wiped blood from his mouth, relocated his shoulder with a wince and a loud snarl of pain, and cast an annoyed glance at Rebecca.

  Finally, in a flash, she understood. Jordan had caught the bullet; it meant that bullets could hurt her. Alan was trying to pin her down.

  They went at it again. Rebecca tore her gaze away and looked for the other man as she whipped the Winchester from around her back. The man in the suit had vanished. Fine. He might be creeping about, but she had to deal with a known threat first.

  She chambered a round, dropped the scope, crouched for stability, and sighted down the brawling couple all in a fluid, practiced motion. The action was not lost on Jordan. She glanced at Rebecca, and this was the split second of distraction that Alan needed to lunge forward and seize her in a bear hug that trapped one of her arms.

  It looked like hugging a jaguar. She snarled and thrashed in Alan’s embrace, raining blows down upon him with her free arm, but he kept his head tucked and weathered the storm. Jordan took them to the ground where they rolled back and forth. Some unnatural power lurked inside that woman; a stray brown-skinned elbow cracked the stone floor and flipped the pair of them up into the air with the force of the rebound.

  It was impossible to get a clean sight on her; impossible to be sure she would shoot the woman and not Alan.

  “Now!” Alan shouted. “Beck-ugh!”

  The woman’s trapped arm broke free, and she returned his bear-hug embrace. It was clear to see as they rolled back and forth that she was crushing the breath from his lungs, even though she could barely reach her arms around him.

  Rebecca breathed deeply, steadily, slowly. She kept the muzzle still, roughly where the two struggling combatants were located, five paces away. She had made trickier shots than this. The tiger that had given her the scars on her face, for example. Nothing trickier than shooting in a jungle at night, going purely on sound because your own blood is in your eyes and you might already be dying. Or the bharal, on the cliff, in the sleetstorm, at twilight, from four hundred meters—the shot that had won her her first personal biplane.

  “I want that kiss, damn it,” she muttered down her sights.

  She took the shot.

  As with all of her great shots, the actual moment of squeezing the trigger always seemed impulsive. Spend all the time in the world planning, gauging, lining it up, but the moment of fire is pure instinct.

  Alan gasped as the smaller woman rolled off of him, either stunned or dead, onto the floor. He tried to stand, failed, and settled for rising to his knees and sucking in huge gulps of sweet air.

  Rebecca approached, chambering another round and keeping her rifle on Jordan Dae, but the woman did not move. She rested as though sleeping atop a spreading pool of deep red blood. Rebecca considered putting another round in, just in case, but a cough from Alan distracted her. “You ok?” she asked him.

  He nodded, but he didn’t look okay. He looked like he had been thrashed for an hour by a gang of vindictive mafia thugs. He had a split lip, a nasty black eye developing, blood trickling down from his scalp, a cut along one cheekbone, and that was just the face. He limped when he stood, the arm that had been dislocated hung uselessly, and his breath wheezed. “Cracked ribs,” he muttered. “Maybe broken.”

  “Anything else broken?”

  He didn’t seem sure. Rebecca understood. He was feeling a lot of pain and powering through on adrenalin. He couldn’t tell just by sensation what bones might be broken or fractured. For now, it was all functionality. “I can walk,” he said. He coughed and hacked up a wad of blood that he spat on the floor next to Jordan. “Nice shot,” he said with a cautious look at the other woman. “Let’s go.”

  Rebecca hesitated. Jordan hadn’t moved. Was she really dead? Rebecca considered one more round, to the head this time. She decided against it. She and Alan had stayed here long enough, drawn enough potential attention. Who knew if another gunshot would summon reinforcements? And with all that blood loss, Jordan wouldn’t be fighting anyone in the near future even if she lived.

  Rebecca shouldered the rifle and joined Alan by the door where the rubber ball waited like a pet, anxious to go for a walk.

  “One more thing,” she said. “Before we go.”

  She didn’t have to tell him what it was. The kiss tasted like blood. But in her experience, those were the good ones.